Are Parents People? (1925)
Director: Malcolm St. Clair. Screenplay: Frances Agnew, from Alice Duer Miller's 1924 short story. Cast: Betty Bronson, Adolphe Menjou, Florence Vidor, Lawrence Gray, George Beranger
TEEN KNOWS BEST
As sweet and as artificial as cotton candy, Are Parents People? is a moderately entertaining family dramedy that, even at a mere 60 minutes, overstays its welcome by a good quarter of an hour. The problem, of course, is not the film's length per se, but the fact that the flimsy and supposedly comic storyline generally lacks both wit and humor.
Incompatibility — and perhaps a case of roving eye on the part of the husband — force Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt (Adolphe Menjou and Florence Vidor) to seek a divorce. Their daughter, Lita (Betty Bronson), feels torn by her parents' decision, especially since both use her as an emotional tool against the other. Tired of being forced to take sides in a war that is not of her making, Lita concocts a plan to reunite those two childish adults.
Director Malcolm St. Clair does his best to make things seem lively and sophisticated, but he is invariably let down by Frances Agnew's vapid screenplay (from a 1924 short story by Alice Duer Miller). Leading lady Betty Bronson, however, is a delight. The Deanna Durbin of the 1920s, Bronson (the teen star of Peter Pan and A Kiss for Cinderella) has lost none of her natural charm in the last eight decades. Florence Vidor provides able support as Bronson's mother, though it's hard to understand why the lovely and sophisticated Vidor could ever be the wife of perennial bore Adolphe Menjou.
There's a Hayley Mills film with a similar plot.