It’s a Wise Child (1931) [Warner Archive Blu-ray Review]
It’s a Wise Child is a reminder that a nearly 100 year old film can be forgotten for so long that it misses the Glory Days of physical media. But, it’s getting a release now! Stuff like this is why Warner Archive discs always move up to the top of my pile every month. That and if I have to talk about one more streaming production this year I’m going to scream.
Table of Contents
The Rarity That Nobody Could Watch
It’s a Wise Child has been one of the most tantalizing ghost titles in pre-Code cinema for as long as people have been cataloguing what the era produced and what has survived it. This 1931 MGM comedy starring Marion Davies was a substantial box office success in its original release, earning over a million dollars in the Depression-era market, was praised by contemporary critics for Davies’s comic timing, and then, with a thoroughness that is almost without parallel in the history of American studio cinema, simply stopped being available. Not lost, not destroyed, not suppressed for its content in any direct sense, but legally inaccessible for over ninety years due to the byzantine succession of ownership disputes over the underlying Broadway play from which it was adapted.
The story of how It’s a Wise Child disappeared is as entertaining as the film itself, which is saying something considerable. Laurence E. Johnson wrote the stage play, which ran on Broadway beginning August 6, 1929, and whose success attracted the attention of every major studio in Hollywood. Universal, Paramount, RKO, and Tiffany all contacted the Hays Office between May and September 1930 seeking permission to adapt it. The play went not to any of them but to William Randolph Hearst, who purchased it for his Cosmopolitan Productions as a vehicle for Marion Davies. Hearst brought Johnson to Hollywood late in 1930 to adapt his own play, and the resulting screenplay was, as the few people who saw it during Davies’s lifetime agreed, considerably more robust and rowdy than the Broadway original.
After Johnson’s death, his wife copyrighted all of his works in 1937. Ownership of the underlying play eventually passed to a private entertainment company whose willingness to clear the rights for television broadcast or home video proved consistently impossible to arrange. MGM could not show it on television when the studio licensed its library to networks in the 1950s. Warner Bros., which eventually acquired the film’s physical distribution rights, could not put it on TCM, could not release it on VHS, could not put it on DVD, could not stream it. It’s a Wise Child became one of the most famous inaccessible films in classic Hollywood history, known to the rare scholar who had seen a nitrate print at UCLA or caught a Cinecon screening but effectively invisible to everyone else.
Johnson’s only Broadway hit, the play that defined his writing career, thus became the instrument that locked his most significant screen adaptation away from audiences for nearly a century. The irony is peculiar and complete. The film was made with every resource that Hearst’s considerable wealth and MGM’s studio machinery could provide. It was seen by the audiences who attended it in 1931 and earned their enthusiastic response. And then it vanished from the accessible world so completely that the mythology around its disappearance grew to proportions that no film seen regularly could have sustained. When the Cinecon 61 audience watched it in 2024, viewers who had spent years reading about it without being able to watch it, the reaction was the specific excitement of encountering something that had been described to you so thoroughly that actually seeing it felt like meeting an old friend for the first time.
That changes now. Pick up It’s a Wise Child at MovieZyng, the dedicated home for Warner Archive releases, because this is genuinely one of the most significant home video events in the history of pre-Code cinema. The underlying play rights have finally lapsed into the public domain, and Warner Archive has moved with admirable speed to restore the film from its best available preservation elements and release it before the film itself enters the public domain in 2027. It’s a Wise Child is available on Blu-ray for the first time, and it is every bit as funny and as vital as the ninety-year mythology around it promised.
Joyce Stanton and the Rumor That Got Out of Hand
It’s a Wise Child opens with Marion Davies behind the wheel of a car, test-driving it at velocities that alarm her passenger considerably, before handing a fender to the car salesman and declining to purchase the vehicle. Within ninety seconds of the film’s opening, the performance is fully established: Davies’s Joyce Stanton is a woman of physical confidence, comic timing, and the specific gift of making improbable behavior seem entirely natural. The film never entirely recovers its energy when she is not on screen, which is not a criticism. It is an acknowledgment that Davies is operating at a level that the material around her, however competent, is working to match.
The situation the film builds around Joyce is a masterpiece of pre-Code comedy construction. Joyce’s brother James has secretly married the family maid Annie, played by Marie Prevost, who is now pregnant. The family, drawing entirely incorrect conclusions from a sequence of overheard conversations and half-observed domestic situations, concludes that it is Joyce who is pregnant. The rumor spreads through the family and then, with the accelerating momentum that small-town gossip always achieves, through the broader social circle of the Stanton household. What the family does not understand is that the pregnant woman under their roof is not Joyce.
The comedy of errors that follows is constructed on the impeccable pre-Code logic that the most uncomfortable moral situation for everyone involved can also be the most useful one. Joyce, who is being pushed toward an unwanted engagement with G.A. Appleby, the bank president whom her brother James courts as a career patron, finds that being assumed pregnant dissolves the engagement more effectively than any direct refusal she could make. The pregnancy rumor becomes a tool of liberation, and Joyce is the only character with sufficient aplomb to recognize and use it as such.
The film’s frank engagement with pregnancy, sex outside marriage, a secret marriage below the class expectations of the Stanton household, and Joyce’s active management of a social situation built on misapprehension about her virtue is precisely the kind of content that made the Hays Office nervous when Universal, Paramount, and the others were circling the play rights in 1930. It is also precisely the kind of content that gives the film its energy and its modernity. The Hays Office, reviewing the play before its adaptation, was concerned about the unwed pregnancy subject matter and the film’s apparent endorsement of Joyce’s deceptive behavior. It’s a Wise Child does not judge Joyce for using the rumor to her advantage. It celebrates her for it, and that celebration is the pre-Code sensibility operating at full confidence.
It’s a Wise Child is not a film that had to be sanitized into acceptability. It got made as the rowdy thing it wanted to be because Hearst controlled the production and had enough influence at MGM to protect it, and the result is a pre-Code comedy that operates with the directness and the frank pleasure in its own subject matter that distinguishes the very best films of the era. The film’s willingness to let Joyce be competent and unrepentant, to frame her management of an absurd situation as the correct response to an absurd situation, is the attitude that the post-Code era would have corrected into something more properly contrite. The pre-Code version is funnier and more honest.
Robert Z. Leonard, Oliver T. Marsh, and the Early Talkie Challenge
Robert Z. Leonard directed It’s a Wise Child, and the film is an interesting case study in what the early sound era asked of a director who had built his reputation in the silent period. Leonard had been a successful director since the teens, working extensively at MGM through the 1920s on a wide range of features, and by 1931 he was one of the studio’s reliable craftsmen with the ability to manage complex productions under pressure. It’s a Wise Child was produced quickly, as MGM productions of the period typically were, and Leonard handles its theatrical source material with a practical efficiency that keeps the action moving without ever quite transcending the stage origins.
Early talkies of 1931 occupied a specific technological and aesthetic moment. The camera had recovered some mobility from the initial constraints of the microphone boom, but the visual language of sound cinema was still being worked out in ways that the best silent-era visual storytelling had already resolved. It’s a Wise Child is accordingly more stagey than a film of the same subject matter made two or three years later would have been, and the theatrical structure of the comedy, with its dependence on domestic spaces and overheard conversations and characters who enter and exit on cue, reads as stage construction more than cinematic construction.
This is not an unusual characteristic for a 1931 early talkie, and for a film with the specific comic architecture of It’s a Wise Child, the stage origins are a feature rather than a limitation. The play’s construction depends on the accumulation and collision of misapprehensions within a single household, which is precisely the kind of physical and spatial comedy that a domestic setting enables. Leonard understood this and staged the comedy with a restraint that serves the material: he does not attempt cinematic elaboration of the kind that would have confused the spatial logic the comedy depends on, and the result is a film that would have been no better for more ambitious direction.
None of this diminishes the film’s pleasures, which are primarily pleasures of performance and dialogue. Cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh, who shot many of Davies’s MGM films and understood how to photograph her to maximum advantage, gives It’s a Wise Child a clean, unobtrusive visual presentation that serves the comedy without calling attention to itself. The MGM production design is, as always in this period, impeccably appropriate: the Stanton household looks like a prosperous American bourgeois interior of exactly the kind that the film’s comedy exists to mock and eventually disrupt.
The screenplay adaptation of Johnson’s play, which Johnson himself prepared under Hearst’s supervision, added the automobile opening that announces Davies’s screen persona immediately and expanded several scenes in ways that the film’s earliest contemporary viewers described as funnier and more outrageous than the Broadway original. That the screen version of It’s a Wise Child surpasses its source material in comic energy is a significant achievement, and it reflects both Johnson’s willingness to loosen his own construction and Davies’s ability to make good material better through the specific qualities she brought to everything she played.
Marion Davies and the Reassessment That Never Ends
Marion Davies was, at the time It’s a Wise Child was released, a genuine star in the commercial sense: audiences came to see her, recognized her screen persona with affection, and responded to her comic gifts with the enthusiasm that box office returns confirm. She was also, simultaneously, one of the most systematically condescended to and undervalued figures in the entire history of Hollywood, and understanding why requires understanding the specific cultural distortion that William Randolph Hearst’s involvement in her career created.
Hearst loved Davies, financed her productions through Cosmopolitan, promoted her in his newspapers, and micromanaged her career toward serious dramatic roles that his own tastes preferred and that her comic gifts did not particularly need. He made her famous and he also made her a subject of mockery, because the combination of his evident patronage and her status as his mistress gave the critical culture of the time permission to dismiss her talent as manufactured by his power. Orson Welles’s fictionalized portrait of the Hearst-Davies relationship in Citizen Kane, in which the Kane surrogate insists on promoting a talentless singer who becomes a figure of public ridicule, calcified that dismissal into cultural mythology. The damage was considerable and the injustice was equally considerable.
The rehabilitation of Davies’s reputation has been ongoing since the 1970s, when film historians like David Thomson began making the case that Citizen Kane’s Susan Alexander bore no meaningful relationship to the actual quality of Davies’s work and talent. Susan Alexander is a creation of Welles’s dramatic argument about the corrupting nature of great wealth and personal obsession. Marion Davies was a gifted comedian who was being directed by Hearst’s preferences away from the kind of comedy she did best and toward the kind of prestige drama he admired. The films where she got to be funny, the films that Hearst viewed as beneath her, are consistently the better films, and It’s a Wise Child is among the best of them. It’s a Wise Child was made at a moment when the combination of a genuinely comic screenplay, a director who understood how to get out of his performers’ way, and a pre-Code environment that permitted the film’s frank subject matter produced exactly the vehicle Davies needed and rarely got.
It’s a Wise Child is one of the clearest pieces of evidence against the Citizen Kane reading of Davies’s talent. Whatever Hearst’s role in her career, and whatever the distortions his influence introduced into the films she made, It’s a Wise Child demonstrates a comic actress of real achievement operating at the top of her abilities in material that suited her completely. Davies’s physical comedy, her timing, her ability to make the most outrageous situations feel inhabited rather than performed: these are skills that nobody else could provide and that no amount of patronage could manufacture. The film was a hit because audiences recognized and responded to something genuine.
James Gleason as Cool Kelly, Joyce’s insinuating and scene-stealing domestic associate, is the ensemble’s secondary pleasure. Gleason was one of the great character actors of the period, capable of broad comedy and genuinely sly underplaying in equal measure, and It’s a Wise Child gives him room for both. His scenes with Davies have the quality of two performers each trusting the other to do something interesting with the next beat, and the trust is consistently justified. Polly Moran provides additional comic texture as Bertha. Sidney Blackmer and Lester Vail handle the more conventionally romantic elements of the plot with competence. But It’s a Wise Child belongs to Davies and Gleason, and the film is wise enough to know it.
Film and Disc Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film Title | It’s a Wise Child |
| Year | 1931 |
| Director | Robert Z. Leonard |
| Screenplay | Laurence E. Johnson (based on his play It’s a Wise Child, 1929) |
| Produced by | Marion Davies, Robert Z. Leonard |
| Production | Cosmopolitan Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Cast | Marion Davies, Sidney Blackmer, James Gleason, Polly Moran, Lester Vail, Marie Prevost, Clara Blandick, Robert McWade, Johnny Arthur, Ben Alexander |
| Cinematography | Oliver T. Marsh |
| Editing | Margaret Booth |
| Runtime | 80 minutes |
| Rating | Not Rated |
| Color/B&W | Black & White |
| First Home Video Release | Yes: never previously available on any home video format |
| Disc Format | BD-50 |
| Aspect Ratio | 1.37:1 with side mattes (16×9) |
| Video | 1080p HD (new 2026 master from 4K scan of best preservation elements) |
| Audio | DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono |
| Subtitles | English SDH |
| MSRP | $24.98 |
| Release Date | May 26, 2026 |
| Distributor | Warner Archive Collection |
Special Features:
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Bosko’s Fox Hunt (1931) | Classic Warner Bros. Cartoon (with disclaimer) |
| Bosko’s Soda Fountain (1931) | Classic Warner Bros. Cartoon (with disclaimer) |
| Crazy House | Classic MGM Short |
| The Rounder | Classic MGM Short |
From Preservation to Blu-ray: Video Quality
The new 2026 1080p HD master for It’s a Wise Child is sourced from 4K scans of the best preservation elements, a distinction worth noting for collectors. The film’s specific preservation history explains why this is not a camera negative scan: the rights complications that kept It’s a Wise Child out of commercial circulation for ninety years did not prevent the physical film from being maintained in archival storage, but they did affect which materials were accessible for formal restoration work. Warner Archive has been transparent about the source, and what the best preservation elements deliver in this case is a genuinely fine presentation.
The image has the visual character of an early 1931 MGM production: clean, functional, appropriately contrasty black-and-white photography that serves the comedy without ambition toward visual poetry. Oliver T. Marsh was one of the most reliable cinematographers in the MGM stable, and his work on It’s a Wise Child is efficient and well-composed in the manner of a craftsman who knew exactly how to light a theatrical adaptation for the camera. The 1.37:1 Academy ratio with side mattes is presented correctly.
Grain is present and naturally rendered, appropriate to the source materials and vintage. The image is stable and readable throughout, with the kind of minor period wear that is entirely appropriate for a 95-year-old film being presented from its best available preservation elements rather than from a pristine negative. There are no anomalies significant enough to impede viewing.
The disclaimer that the video source is preservation elements rather than the camera negative is an honest and welcome transparency about what Warner Archive was able to work with, and the resulting presentation exceeds what most preservation-element sources of comparable vintage deliver. For a film that has been seen in any legitimate home context essentially never, this Blu-ray is an extraordinary gift to the audience that has been waiting for it.
Audio and Supplements
The DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono audio is clean and appropriately rendered for a 1931 early talkie. Dialogue clarity is the essential requirement for a film this dependent on witty exchanges and rapid-fire domestic comedy, and it is consistently strong. The audio reflects the specific acoustic qualities of early sound production: slightly boxy in enclosed interiors, opening up somewhat in the broader domestic spaces of the Stanton household. These are period characteristics of the source material rather than deficiencies in the encoding, and they are handled honestly rather than corrected artificially. English SDH subtitles are included and will be useful for the early talkie acoustic conditions that some viewers find challenging.
The supplements package pairs It’s a Wise Child with four period-appropriate short subjects. The two Bosko cartoons, both from 1931, come with disclaimers acknowledging the racial caricature elements that are present in early Warner Bros. animation from this era. Their inclusion is historically appropriate and their presentation with contextual disclaimers is the right approach. The MGM shorts “Crazy House” and “The Rounder” round out a supplements package that situates It’s a Wise Child in its original theatrical exhibition context with the care that Warner Archive consistently brings to this kind of curatorial pairing.
It’s a Wise Child Is Available Now from Warner Archive
It’s a Wise Child is a discovery, a genuine one. This is not a film being rescued from obscurity because someone thought it deserved a second look. It is a film that has been locked away from virtually every viewer alive, that earned its original audience’s enthusiasm and then lost them through no fault of the film itself, and that arrives on Blu-ray in 2026 with all the freshness of something genuinely new. Marion Davies in It’s a Wise Child is Marion Davies at her comic best, and Marion Davies at her comic best is one of the great pleasures of the pre-Code era.
The rights history that kept this film away for ninety-five years has also, in a perverse way, preserved it from the kind of cultural familiarity that can flatten a film’s impact. Nobody has been watching It’s a Wise Child on late-night television, or sampling clips online, or folding it into the canonical pre-Code conversations because it was simply not available to be folded in. It arrives on this Blu-ray as something genuinely fresh, a comedy from 1931 that has been waiting in excellent preservation for an audience that had no way to find it until now.
It also arrives at a moment when the Marion Davies reassessment is well underway among classic film enthusiasts, when the specific injustice of the Citizen Kane caricature has been widely acknowledged and the actual quality of Davies’s comic work has been receiving the serious critical attention it deserves. It’s a Wise Child is the strongest single piece of evidence for what that reassessment argues, and it is now, for the first time, available for the broad audience to encounter. The film makes its case without any advocacy required. Just watch it.
Pick up It’s a Wise Child at MovieZyng, where you will find the complete Warner Archive Collection catalog alongside this release. The disc is available now at an MSRP of $24.98. Do not wait on this one. A film that has been in the vault for ninety-five years deserves to be seen immediately.
It’s a Wise Child (Warner Archive Collection) | Not Rated | 80 minutes | Released May 26, 2026
