Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 12

Despite the success of Wee Willie Winkie and Heidi, 20th Century Fox decided to table, for the time being at least, any literary pretensions in Shirley's pictures. In Child Star Shirley says otherwise: "Ahead would be Fanchon the Cricket followed by Pollyanna..." -- but nothing ever came of those, and she never mentions either title again, not even to explain why they didn't happen. Both, not coincidentally, had been Mary Pickford vehicles in 1915 and 1920, respectively.

Fanchon, despite what Shirley says, was almost certainly never on the agenda. The 1849 George Sand novel on which it was based (La Petite Fadette) had no particular following in the U.S., and Pickford's picture of it was long forgotten -- presumed lost, in fact (a partial print didn't surface until 1999). Besides, the character of a semi-feral peasant girl who wins the love of a respectable village boy in rural France was hardly a good fit for Shirley. Perhaps Mother Gertrude mentioned the title for (or to) Shirley, but Darryl Zanuck surely didn't.

Pollyanna is another case entirely; why that one never happened is a mystery. The idea was a natural, more natural in fact than Heidi. For that matter, Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel was virtually an American carbon copy of Heidi -- without goats and mountains, with an aunt instead of a grandfather, and with Heidi and Klara, the crippled friend who learns to walk again, combined into the one character of Pollyanna Whittier. The story could easily have accommodated as many songs for Shirley as Zanuck and his minions cared to throw at it, and could even have been updated to the 1930s without doing serious damage to the original. Fox's failure to follow this lead has to count as a major missed opportunity, maybe even (depending on the results, of course) a crime against posterity. Could the problem have been that the Porter novel was still under copyright? I suppose we'll never know.

Shirley wrote about Zanuck "grappling with that chronic demon" of "selecting my next screenplay." The grappling produced results -- Shirley made three pictures in 1938 -- but the results were, alas, generally undistinguished. Shirley described one of those pictures as "unfailingly bland", but she could have been talking about any of the three, and we can deal with each of them in a very few paragraphs.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (released March 25, 1938)

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was another of Shirley's "no trace" pictures, like Poor Little Rich Girl and (allegedly) The Littlest Rebel. What there was no trace of this time was the 1903 novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin. The story had been filmed faithfully in 1917 with Mary Pickford and again in 1932 with Marian Nixon (produced by Fox Film Corp., so the post-merger studio still had the property lying around). For this incarnation, the studio adopted the same curious practice they had used with Poor Little Rich Girl: take a title widely identified with Mary Pickford, then make a picture with absolutely no connection to what Pickford and Co. did with it.

As if to ensure that Rebecca would be as familiar as possible, Zanuck and associate producer Raymond Griffith packed the supporting cast with returnees from Shirley's earlier pictures: Gloria Stuart and Jack Haley from Poor Little Rich Girl; Helen Westley from Dimples, Stowaway and Heidi; Slim Summerville from Captain January; Bill Robinson from The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel; J. Edward Bromberg, the deus ex machina judge from Stowaway, serving the same function as a doctor this time; even Alan Dinehart, the sleazeball detective from way back in Baby Take a Bow, was brought back. Of the names on this poster, only Randolph Scott and Phyllis Brooks were new, and both would work with Shirley again before the year was out. The director, once again, was Heidi's reliably unimaginative Allan Dwan.

Even the story was a bit of a recycle; as in Poor Little Rich Girl, Shirley becomes a radio star unbeknownst to her ostensible guardian (duties divided this time between her grumpy aunt Helen Westley and shifty stepfather William Demarest) when, while living with her aunt on the farm of the title, she sneaks out for a remote broadcast from the farmhouse of her neighbor, radio producer Randolph Scott.

During that broadcast, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm drops all pretense to being anything more than Shirley Temple In Concert. The program's emcee (Jack Haley) invites Shirley/Rebecca to "sing the songs that made a lot of people happy." So she sings:

My dear radio audience, 
Now I shall do
Some of the songs I've had the pleasure of introducing to you...

This, mind you, on what is supposedly her very first broadcast. What follows is a medley of "On the Good Ship Lollipop" from Bright Eyes, "Animal Crackers in My Soup" from Curly Top, "When I'm With You" and "Oh, My Goodness" from Poor Little Rich Girl and "Good Night, My Love" (the lyric changed to "Good Night, My Friends") from Stowaway. "Ah, but it's great to reminisce," Shirley/Rebecca sighs.

Like Captain January, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was one of Shirley's first pictures to hit TV in the 1950s, so it has a special place in the childhood memories of many Baby Boomers. And giving credit where it's due, Rebecca is a pleasant enough vehicle for Shirley. But it plows familiar ground while the original furrows are still fairly fresh. Those Baby Boomers (including myself) first saw Rebecca on its own, without the feeling of deja vu that comes from knowing about all the other movies it ransacks for actors, songs and plot elements. 

"Flin" in Variety wasn't fooled. He gave Shirley full credit as "a great little artist", but added:

The rest is synthetic and disappointing. Why they named it "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" is one of those mysteries. The only resemblance is a load of hay, a litter of pigs and Bill Robinson's straw hat.

But Rebecca's familiarity doesn't always breed contempt. The picture ends, and I'll end my comments on it, with Shirley singing "The Toy Trumpet" by Sidney Mitchell and Lew Pollack, then dancing the song with Bill Robinson. Granted, it's really just a less-bravura retread of "Military Man" from Poor Little Rich Girl, but hey, it's still Shirley and Bojangles (yet again, colorized):

Little Miss Broadway (released July 22, 1938)

Little Miss Broadway was the one Shirley called "unfailingly bland", and that about sums it up. Shirley is once again an orphan, this time moving from her orphanage to live with a friend of her late parents (Edward Ellis) who runs a hotel for entertainers. The curmudgeon this time is the rich old landlady next door (Edna May Oliver, her middle name misspelled as "Mae"), who not only plots to get rid of those unsavory show people by selling their hotel out from under them, but (channeling Sara Haden's truant officer from Captain January) moves to have Shirley returned to her orphanage. Meanwhile, her playboy nephew (George Murphy) is charmed by Shirley and smitten with Ellis's daughter (Phyllis Brooks of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) and tries to thwart the old girl. It all ends in the courtroom of judge Claude Gillingwater, with Shirley and her troupers proving that they've got a moneymaking show on their hands and can afford to keep the hotel open.

Little Miss Broadway was the first of two straight pictures Shirley made with associate producer David Hempstead. The other pictures Hempstead would make at Fox before decamping to RKO in 1940 were Happy Landing, Hold That Co-ed, Straight Place and Show and It Could Happen to You -- not B pictures exactly, but definitely A-minus, and the same must be said for both of Shirley's pictures for him. Even Mother Gertrude had noticed, with some alarm, the budget cutbacks in Shirley's pictures, and there's a chintzy, slapdash quality to Little Miss Broadway. It shows in odd ways, too -- for example, the fact that Edna May Oliver, at the time one of the best-known and most popular character actresses in movies, couldn't even get her name spelled correctly in the credits. (Also, the fact that as curmudgeon du jour, she doesn't actually get won over by Shirley; like grumpy aunt Helen Westley in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she just stops being a curmudgeon and turns nice when the Harry Tugend-Jack Yellen screenplay decides it's time.) And by the way, the thought of Shirley and Jimmy Durante in a movie together may sound promising, but it's just a tease; he spends more time flirting with soubrette Patricia Wilder at the hotel's switchboard than he does on screen with Shirley.

In Child Star Shirley spends less time talking about the picture itself than about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to the set during production. 'Nuff said.

But at least Shirley had a couple of nice dance turns with George Murphy. One

was the climactic title number (by Walter Bullock and Harold Spina), in which

George and Shirley's song-and-dance magically turns Judge Gillingwater's

courtroom into a glittering Busby Berkeley-style replica of Times Square. But

I'm posting here their earlier number, "We Should Be Together" (also by Bullock

and Spina); the colorized YouTube clip is better quality, and besides, the number

itself is more fun:

In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent was rather sympathetic: "The devastating Mistress Temple is slightly less devastating than usual in 'Little Miss Broadway,'...Although she performs with her customary gayety [sic] and dimpled charm, there is no mistaking the effort every dimple cost her." Variety's "Flin" added: "Shirley is better than her new vehicle, which in turn is better than her last one, 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'" Whether Little Miss Broadway was really better than Shirley's last vehicle is open to debate. But it was certainly better than her next one.


Just Around the Corner (released December 2, 1938)

If Little Miss Broadway was an A-minus picture, Just Around the Corner was no more than a B-plus. If that. Shirley plays Penny Hale, who is taken out of private school when her widowed architect father (Charles Farrell) loses his job, and consequently the penthouse he and Penny have been living in, as well as the money to pay for her school. He's now forced to work as the electrician in the apartment building where they formerly occupied the penthouse, and he and Penny must now make do with a tiny apartment in the basement.

The penthouse now belongs to tycoon Samuel G. Henshaw (Claude Gillingwater again), the uncle of Penny's new playmate Milton (Bennie Bartlett) and her father's sweetheart Lola (Amanda Duff). This coincidence leads Penny to confuse the real man with the symbolic "Uncle Sam" -- after all, he has the same white goatee -- and to set about pulling him, her father and the country out of the economic doldrums by staging a benefit show at five cents admission.

Just Around the Corner, like Little Miss Broadway before it, was directed by Irving Cummings -- the same man who had warned Mother Gertrude during Poor Little Rich Girl two years earlier that it was time for the studio to find better stories for Shirley, now that she had lost "that baby quality". I doubt if this is what he had in mind. Shirley is ten now -- or nine, depending on which version of her birth certificate people believed. In any case, she's too old to be mistaking the "I Want You!" Uncle Sam for somebody's real uncle who happens to go by that name. Conversely, she's still too young to be spouting the lick-the-Depression pep talks that Warner Baxter once declaimed in Stand Up and Cheer!

Shirley remembered that her mother became alarmed at the trend of her recent pictures, not only the decreasing budgets, but the sameness of Shirley's roles. As Shirley remembered it, her mother met with Zanuck and "expressed the opinion that recent scripts were forcing me into rigid, stereotyped roles inappropriate to my growth." Zanuck countered that the public didn't want their stars to change. "Now she's lovable...The less she changes, the longer she lasts."

Just Around the Corner wasn't a dead loss. It's worth seeing for, if nothing else, Shirley's final teaming with Bill Robinson. Their last number together, "I Love to Walk in the Rain" (by Walter Bullock and Harold Spina), was a bit anticlimactic; more their style was an earlier number, "This Is a Happy Little Ditty", in which they're joined by Joan Davis and Bert Lahr. Their dance here looks more like Bojangles's work and less like that of credited dance directors Nick Castle and Geneva Sawyer. Note especially Bojangles's truckin'-on-down entrance into the number -- that man could dance down a staircase like nobody's business! (Note also, earlier in the number, when Shirley and Joan Davis get out of step with each other. Now there's a typical B-movie touch for you: either nobody noticed, or they didn't bother to retake it so Joan and Shirley could get it right.)

The unsigned review in Variety was surprisingly positive ("topflight for general all-around entertainment"), but conceded, "Youngster is unquestionably getting more mature, and in growing older, Shirley seems to be under stress of acting rather than being natural." At the Times, Frank Nugent was biting:

Fee-fi-fo-fum, and a couple of ho-hums. Shirley Temple is at the Roxy in "Just Around the Corner" and that's where we're lurking with a cleaver in one hand and a lollypop [sic] in the other...Shirley is not responsible, of course. No child could conceive so diabolic a form of torture. There must be an adult mind in back of it all -- way, way in back of it all.

And we'll leave the picture with those two swings of the critical pendulum.

Next time out, Shirley would be restored to the undeniable ranks of Fox's A-pictures. No expense would be spared -- including, for the first time since the final seconds of The Little Colonel, the use of Technicolor.

To be continued...

.

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 11

So far we've taken Shirley up to the middle of 1937. She's been Hollywood's top box-office star for two years, and she'll go on to be for two years more. This is probably a good time to deal with one of Hollywood's most persistent and tantalizing legends: Is it true that Shirley Temple was originally set to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? The short answer is: No, but there may be a complicated grain of truth to the legend. In fact, given Shirley's stature in the industry during the mid-to-late 1930s, it's unlikely that there wouldn't be something to it.

First of all, before we go any further, dismiss from your mind any images of Shirley chirping her way through "Over the Rainbow" or pumping her fists and pouting that she wants to go home. Frankly, I suspect those are scare-images conjured up by Judy Garland's more jealous fans, in that unique way they have of seeking to tear down anyone they see as a threat (Deanna Durbin, for example) -- as if Judy needs that kind of help. If Shirley had made The Wizard of Oz, there would certainly have been no "Over the Rainbow", and possibly no songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg at all. The Wizard of Oz starring Shirley Temple would have been utterly and absolutely different -- far more different, for example, than Gone With the Wind would have been if Paulette Goddard had played Scarlett rather than Vivien Leigh. Granted, it's hard to imagine The Wizard of Oz being any better (though it's not impossible: I do wish Buddy Ebsen had been able to stay on as the Tin Man). But that doesn't mean it would have been any worse. Just different. In that alternate universe where Shirley played Dorothy, W.C. Fields played the Wizard, Buddy Ebsen played the Scarecrow and Edna May Oliver was the Wicked Witch of the West, it's entirely possible that people there cherish their Wizard of Oz just as much as we do ours.

The most common form of the legend goes like this: In 1937, 20th Century Fox and MGM worked out a tentative star-swap. Fox would get the services of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow to star in a picture called Mrs. O'Leary's Cow about the Chicago Fire of 1871; in return, MGM would get Shirley to play Dorothy in Oz and to co-star in another picture with Gable. But when Harlow died suddenly in June 1937 the whole deal was off; Fox made their picture, now called In Old Chicago, with Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, and MGM didn't get Shirley.

The story is interesting, with an appealing for-the-want-of-a-nail quality to it. Henry King, the man who eventually directed In Old Chicago, told it once in print (I recall reading it, but have been unable to remember or track down where), and Shirley repeats it in Child Star. But the story doesn't really fit the facts. At the time of Harlow's death, the screen rights to The Wizard of Oz belonged not to MGM but to Samuel Goldwyn, who had purchased them in 1933 for $40,000.

Shirley gets another point wrong in Child Star when she talks about who might play "the role of fourteen-year-old Dorothy"; she actually more than doubles Dorothy's probable age. In L. Frank Baum's first Oz book Dorothy's age isn't mentioned, but W.W. Denslow's illustrations show a girl of six or seven, and internal evidence in later Oz books suggests that that's about right. In other words, Dorothy in The [original] Wizard of Oz is almost exactly the age of Shirley Temple at the height of her career at Fox. It may well be that around that time Darryl Zanuck tried to obtain the rights as a vehicle for his biggest star (wouldn't you?), but aside from him there wouldn't have been a lot of interest in the book. In any case the point was moot; Goldwyn wasn't selling (what he though he was going to do with the property is anybody's guess).

Then things changed on December 21, 1937 when Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. It was an immediate smash hit -- and suddenly there was a renewed interest in making movies out of fairy tales. In The Making of The Wizard of Oz Aljean Harmetz quotes a New York Times story of February 19, 1938 telling how Goldwyn was suddenly besieged with offers to take Oz off his hands: "Twentieth Century-Fox [sic] is reported anxious to purchase the book for Shirley Temple, but all offers have been rejected."

Then MGM made Goldwyn an offer he couldn't refuse, and the deal was finalized on June 3, 1938: MGM bought the rights to The Wizard of Oz from Goldwyn for $75,000. Louis B. Mayer, Ms. Harmetz says, tried to borrow Shirley from Zanuck, but to no avail. (Shirley claims Zanuck made a counter-offer to buy the rights from Mayer, but I question her reliability on that point; she may have been reporting second- or third-hand studio gossip or wishful thinking. It seems to me that if Zanuck couldn't offer Goldwyn enough to get the rights from him, he wasn't likely to offer enough to MGM when the price was $35,000 higher.)

In later years Arthur Freed, who always inflated his role in producing The Wizard of Oz, insisted he intended all along for Judy Garland to play Dorothy -- even saying he would have refused to make it with anybody else. We can dismiss that. Freed was only a songwriter in 1938 with no track record as a producer (and he got no screen credit on Oz). If Louis B. Mayer could bring Gene Kelly into his office in 1951 and tell him to make Singin' in the Rain with Debbie Reynolds (a nobody), he'd have had no problem ordering Freed to make The Wizard of Oz with Shirley Temple whether he liked it or not. And Freed would have done as he was told; he got where he was by sucking up to L.B. (to be fair, he stayed where he was by producing one great and profitable musical after another for nearly 20 years).

So...sorting all this out, it strikes me that the bottom line is this: In the mid-1930s, if anybody ever gave a serious thought to remaking The Wizard of Oz (there had been two silent versions), the obvious and only possible choice to play Dorothy would have been Shirley Temple, and that very idea came up more than once. But for whatever reason, 20th Century Fox never got control of the property. Samuel Goldwyn, who owned it, seems never to have seriously considered filming it. Then in 1938, when MGM pried the rights loose from Goldwyn, they tried to borrow Shirley but couldn't. As Aljean Harmetz correctly points out, if it had ever come to a serious showdown between Shirley and Judy Garland for the role, Judy would certainly have lost. Ergo, in this universe at least, it was never going to happen, Hollywood gossip and later tales notwithstanding. "Sometimes," as Shirley said, "the gods know best."

For the picture Shirley actually did make next, the question of rights was never an issue -- the story had recently drifted into the public domain.

Heidi (released November 5, 1937)

According to Variety, Heidi was chosen for Shirley by public demand, as expressed in her fan mail -- although the showbiz bible may simply have been parroting a studio press release. Either way, the role was a natural for Shirley. The source was a novel by Johanna Spyri (1827-1901), first published in the author's native Switzerland in 1880. The book was instantly popular, and promptly translated from its original German into virtually every written language on Earth. The book was -- and remains -- so popular, in fact, that it's surprising to realize that Shirley's picture in 1937 was the first attempt to make a movie out of it (there have been over a dozen since).

To direct Heidi, Darryl Zanuck first approached Henry King, and he was an excellent choice. King's directing career began in 1915 (and would stretch on to 1962), and he was one of that select group of directors who mastered moviemaking in the silent era, then adapted easily to the changing times when sound came in. By 1937, at Fox, he had already directed, among others, the first State Fair ('33) with Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor; Ramona ('36), Fox's first Technicolor picture, from the Helen Hunt Jackson novel of old California; and Lloyds of London (also '36), which made a star of Tyrone Power (who would work with King ten more times). Still to come were some of 20th Century Fox's most important and successful pictures: Alexander's Ragtime Band ('38), Jesse James ('39), The Song of Bernadette ('43), Wilson ('44), Twelve O'Clock High ('49), The Gunfighter ('50). King was the only director under contract to Fox who even approached the stature of John Ford (though King was a rather distant second at that), and if he had worked with Shirley it might have carried her farther along that fork in the road her career had taken with Wee Willie Winkie.

Alas, it was not to be. As King remembered it some 40 years later, he was on a busman's holiday in Honolulu, doing prep work with the script for In Old Chicago, when he became stranded there by a steamship strike. Zanuck cabled him that In Old Chicago was being postponed and that he (Zanuck) wanted King to consider directing Heidi. "I immediately went to a bookstore in Honolulu, read it and didn't think there was much of a movie in it. I don't believe in fairies to begin with."

It's hard to imagine what King meant by that last sentence; Heidi is no fairy tale. Otherwise, his point is well taken -- at first glance there isn't much of a movie in Heidi. The story is unevenly weighted; most of the plot is stuffed into the first 240 pages (my edition runs to 404), followed by 140 pages of anticlimax before the story kicks in again for the last 20. For all that, however, the book paints a vivid picture of now-bygone country life in the Swiss Alps, and the characters have considerable charm, Heidi herself supremely so. It ought to have been right up King's alley, but he didn't see it that way; he was far more excited about In Old Chicago and wanted to concentrate on that. The prospect of working with Shirley was no inducement, he recalled telling Zanuck: "'I've had my time directing children. I don't want to start all over again.' I had done Little Mary Sunshine and all those Baby Marie pictures way back, and that was all behind me." ("Baby" Marie Osborne was a long-forgotten child star of the 1910s with whom King had made several pictures.)

With King taking a pass, the job of directing Heidi fell to Allan Dwan, whose movie career went back even further than King's. Dwan began directing even before the advent of feature films, when directors on location wore six-shooters on their hips to protect against both the rattlesnakes in the Los Angeles hills and raiding thugs from Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company. By the time he retired in the late 1950s, Dwan would rack up a mind-boggling 403 credits (he claimed as many as a thousand more, but couldn't be sure). Dwan is also the source of one of my favorite stories of those early wild-and-woolly days of moviemaking on the fly. He was with one such company on location in the wilds of Southern California, serving as a sort of paleo-location manager, when the director disappeared on a drunk. When several days passed without the man returning, Dwan cabled the higher-ups back in Chicago suggesting that the cast and crew be recalled; they wired back, "You direct." Dwan called the gang together and put it to them: "Either I'm a director or you're all out of a job." Without exception they all said, "You're the best damn director we ever saw." 

As that anecdote suggests, Dwan throughout his prolific career was more stage manager than creative artist, and that was the attitude he brought to Heidi. In Child Star Shirley quotes him in a later interview as saying, "I liked to avoid children, especially those that were 'over.' She had hit her peak and was sliding fast when I started working with her." Shirley doesn't say when or to whom Dwan said this, but he was clearly speaking from hindsight; in 1937 few people thought Shirley Temple was "over". Now, we can see that Shirley's career at Fox had indeed peaked -- probably with Captain January, Poor Little Rich Girl, Stowaway and Wee Willie Winkie -- but she had been number one at the box office in 1935 and 1936, and would continue to be in 1937 and 1938. Dwan overcame his hesitation at working with Shirley (she won him over, of course; she won everybody over -- except perhaps Alice Faye), and he and Shirley went on to make two more pictures together. Shirley was by no means "sliding fast" when she made Heidi -- but her slide started soon thereafter, and the pictures she made with Dwan were a part of it. Small wonder that years later he preferred to believe that she was already fading before he came along.

The story of Heidi hardly needs synopsizing; nearly everybody knows it -- or thinks they do. A sweet little orphan girl is dumped by an unfeeling aunt with her grandfather, a bitter, reclusive hermit and a stranger to her. Then, just as Heidi is beginning to thaw the heart of the old man, the aunt returns and kidnaps Heidi away to be sold to a wealthy Frankfurt family as a companion for the crippled daughter of the house.

Screenwriters Walter Ferris and Julien Josephson grappled with the narrative fermata that sets in on page 240 of Johanna Spyri's book, choosing to solve the problem in a way that was utilitarian but not really felicitous. In the book Heidi makes friends with the crippled Klara -- in fact, with everyone in the household except Fraulein Rottenmaier, the starchy, humorless old maid housekeeper. But Heidi becomes so homesick that Klara's doctor insists she be sent home to her grandfather. Then come those 140 pages of Heidi romping through the Alps with her friend Peter, the goatherd, and mending the hard feelings between her grandfather and the villagers below. All this time Heidi keeps in touch with Klara, who finally comes to visit when the doctor agrees her frail health is strong enough. In the clean Alpine air, and with the encouragement of Heidi and her grandfather, Klara's health is restored and she's able to leave her wheelchair and walk again.

Ferris and Josephson replaced all this pastoral cavorting with melodrama. Heidi doesn't go home to her grandfather until the very end; before that the old man (Jean Hersholt) walks the 100 miles to Frankfurt in search of her, then stalks the city streets calling her name, sometimes missing her my mere seconds. Meanwhile, Fraulein Rottenmaier (Mary Nash) is upgraded (or downgraded) from a mere narrow-minded, stiff-necked stick-in-the-mud to a full-fledged villainess; she plots to keep Klara (Marcia Mae Jones) crippled and dependent in the hope that the girl's father Herr Sesemann (Sidney Blackmer) will be moved to marry his "indispensable" housekeeper. When Heidi unwittingly thwarts Fraulein R. by teaching Klara to walk, the fraulein retaliates by -- I am not making this up -- trying to sell Heidi to a band of gypsies. Only the intervention of a cool-headed police captain clears the way for a happy ending back on Heidi's mountain.

Heidi gets off to a promising start. The picture's Lake Arrowhead
locations, combined with good special effects (probably the work
of Fred Sersen, Fox's effects wizard) make a credible substitute for
Switzerland, and the early scenes of Heidi's unquenchable good
cheer slowly charming her gruff, taciturn old grandfather -- Shirley
once again winning over a crusty curmudgeon -- are well-played
by Shirley and a nearly silent Hersholt. One particularly charming
touch is a lilting little melody that Heidi hums to herself as she
goes about her chores -- and which the grandfather eventually
finds himself humming without even realizing it. So far the
movie has been absolutely faithful to the spirit -- and
reasonably faithful to the letter -- of Johanna Spyri's
story.

This lasts precisely 19 minutes and 37 seconds.

Then disaster strikes -- incredibly enough, in the form of exactly the sort of thing Darryl Zanuck said he didn't want in Wee Willie Winkie. As Heidi and her grandfather sit at their cabin table, he ostensibly begins reading her a story about "The Magic Wooden Shoes". The camera moves in on a woodcut in the book, and the picture dissolves to a quaint little Dutch scene by a storybook Zuider Zee, and there's Shirley -- or is it Heidi? -- in blonde braids and bangs and a starched cap, singing about her shoes: 

Have you seen my new shoes?

They are made out of wood.

Such nice little shoes.

Don't you think they look good?

(The song is "In Our Little Wooden Shoes" by Lew Pollack and Sidney D. Mitchell, uncredited.) Then Shirley leads her companions, all of them dressed in adorable Hans Brinker costumes (the boys look like they all stepped off a can of house paint), in an energetic clog dance (staged by Sammy Lee, also uncredited), with Shirley soaring over their heads to land in a treetop, then turning to sail back to earth -- or rather, to the stage floor -- again.

Then, apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever, the scene dissolves to an elegant marbled hall, with Shirley dolled up like a miniature Marie Antoinette, leading (presumably) the same troupe of children, now dressed like lords and ladies of the French court, in a genteel minuet to the same tune. Then the number segues back to that stagebound Holland and its two-dimensional windmills, and finally back again to Switzerland as the grandfather tucks the sleeping Heidi into her little bed.

There's nothing really "wrong", exactly, with all this, except for one thing: It doesn't belong here. It has nothing to do with the life of a little girl in provincial Switzerland in 1880, but it has plenty to do with being Shirley Temple in 1937. This silly little number, coming when it does, wrecks Heidi beyond fixing. After this, we no longer believe we're in Switzerland or, later, Frankfurt; we can't possibly be anywhere but Hollywood. (The melodramatic blandishments of the script -- selling Heidi to gypsies?? -- and Dwan's directing every scene at a headlong, breakneck pace, as if he has to be somewhere across town 15 minutes after calling cut, certainly don't help.)

Shirley tells us that the number was inserted in the picture halfway through shooting. Whose bright idea was it? I blame Darryl Zanuck; nothing happened at his studio or went into his pictures that he didn't know about and approve. What ever happened to "We don't want to depend on any of her tricks" or "She should not be doing things because she is Shirley Temple, but because the situations -- sound and believable -- call for them"? I can only think -- and this is pure speculation on my part -- that Zanuck's edicts in that story conference on Wee Willie Winkie were said simply to placate John Ford, as if Ford had said, "All right, Darryl, I'll direct your Shirley Temple picture, but don't try to saddle me with any of those cute little song-and-dance scenes; I won't have it." Maybe if Henry King had agreed to direct Heidi, those edicts would have stood. King might well have insisted, but not a director like Dwan. 

At the time, Shirley enjoyed the number, enjoyed wearing those Dutch braids and bangs, enjoyed being flown on that invisible wire. In retrospect, writing in Child Star, she saw it as the turning point in her career. She called the "Wooden Shoes" number "a traditional Temple musical filler", adding that "it marked the collapse of any studio resolve to build on the purely dramatic momentum first evident in Wee Willie Winkie." With the same hindsight we can see that Shirley was right.

That's in hindsight, however; no such thing was apparent at the time. In 1937, the picture was a major hit. Along with Wee Willie Winkie, Shirley's only other picture that year, it kept her the number-one box office star, and Heidi became one of Shirley's signature roles. Maybe even the signature role; to this day, it's often the first picture mentioned when Shirley's name comes up. Reviews were positive -- better, in fact, than for Wee Willie Winkie. Variety's "Char" called it "good for average Temple draw or better" (which it was), and said it "follows the original [novel] rather faithfully" (which it didn't). In the Times, Frank S. Nugent was, for him, almost rhapsodic: "All of it has been framed handsomely in the snows of a Hollywood Switzerland, with a soft sepia (and blue) tinting to accentuate its dreamworld quality" (unlike Wee Willie Winkie, Heidi has not survived in that form). Nugent closed by admitting, "Shirley has scored another 'coo.'"

But looking back, we can see the handwriting on the wall. For me, seeing Heidi again for the first time in nearly 60 years was an eye-opening shock. I had remembered it as one of Shirley's best-loved pictures. In fact, it always perplexed me that the 1952 Swiss version, which I saw about the same time, stayed fresher in my memory over the decades. Seeing Shirley's again, I'm no longer perplexed. Heidi is no doubt one of her best-loved pictures, but it's not one of her best. Despite those very good early scenes, and some later ones like the scene where the grandfather accompanies Heidi to the church that he hasn't visited in years (straight out of Frau Spyri's novel), the picture never recovers from the miscalculation of "In Our Little Wooden Shoes"; it's one of the head-scratching what-on-Earth-were-they-thinking moments of 1930s Hollywood. What they were thinking, I suspect -- or more to the point, what Darryl Zanuck was thinking -- was that his dictum about writing the story as if it were a Little Women or David Copperfield, about writing for Shirley as an actress and not depending on any of her tricks, was no longer operative. Henceforth, as far as 20th Century Fox was concerned, Shirley's tricks would be her stock in trade. The studio was no longer interested in Shirley becoming an actress; instead, they would keep her a baby taking a bow for as long as they could get away with it. 

To be continued...

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Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 10

On July 30, 1936 there was a story conference on what would become Shirley's next picture after Stowaway. At that conference, according to notes published in Rudy Behlmer's Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox studio chief said:

I feel the only way to make this story is to disregard the formula of all the previous pictures Shirley Temple has appeared in to date...My idea...is to forget that it is a Shirley Temple picture. That is, not to forget that she is the star, but to write the story as if it were a Little Women or a David Copperfield...All the hokum must be thrown out. The characters must be made real, human, believable. Only then can we get a powerful, real story.

The role must be written for Shirley as an actress, and nothing sloughed over because Shirley is in it and therefore it will be good. We don't want to depend on any of her tricks. She should not be doing things because she is Shirley Temple, but because the situations -- sound and believable -- call for them. In other words, write a role and let Shirley adapt herself to the picture.

This conference took place almost a full year before the picture was released. Without checking studio archives, we can't be sure if Zanuck had already assigned a director, but given his determination to disregard the Shirley Temple formula, he probably had. In any case, the assignment went to John Ford, whom Zanuck had under non-exclusive contract. Ford had been directing since 1917, had already won the first of his four Oscars for The Informer at RKO, and was on the threshold of his own personal Golden Age, which would extend into the 1960s. According to Ford biographer Scott Eyman, Ford gave two accounts of his reaction to being assigned a Shirley Temple picture. In the one Eyman finds more likely, Ford said "my face fell atop the floor." In the other, more consistent with the director's self-image as a no-nonsense moviemaker, "I said 'Great' and we just went out and made the picture."

Wee Willie Winkie (released July 23, 1937)

Calling the picture "Rudyard Kipling's" Wee Willie Winkie was a bit of an overstatement. The original story was published in 1888, when the future Nobel Prize winner was 22. It told of Percival William Williams, the six-year-old son of an army colonel stationed with his regiment in British India at the foot of the Khyber Pass on the indistinct border with Afghanistan. Percival has a penchant for nicknaming people, including himself, so he has adopted the name Wee Willie Winkie from one of his nursery-books. Winkie is bright but typically mischievous for a boy his age, and under the military discipline imposed by his father he is forever earning, then forfeiting, a succession of Good Conduct Badges.

One soldier that Winkie takes a particular shine to is Lt. Brandis, whom he nicknames "Coppy" for his copper-colored hair. His affection for Coppy is so great that when he sees Coppy "vehemently kissing" the daughter of one Major Allardyce he keeps the secret to himself.

Shortly thereafter, for yet another infraction, Winkie once more loses his Good Conduct Badge and is "confined to quarters under arrest" -- what a later generation would call "grounded". But when he sees Coppy's Miss Allardyce, in a fit of willful independence, riding out beyond the river where all are forbidden to go, Winkie breaks arrest and rides after her on his little pony.

He catches up only when her own horse stumbles and throws her, twisting her ankle so that she cannot stand. She pleads with him to ride back to the post for help. But Winkie has been taught that "a man must always look after a girl", and when he sees men approaching from the hills -- bandits, perhaps, or worse -- he dismounts and whips his pony, sending it galloping home without its rider. When the natives come across the boy and the injured young woman, they begin mulling over whether to take them hostage for ransom.

Winkie bravely stands up to them, to their great amusement, ordering them to send to the post for help. One of the natives, a former groom at the post, warns his fellows that disturbing these two will only be asking for trouble, and the debate among them goes on long enough for Winkie's pony to reach home and for the alarm to be sounded. As the regiment rides to the rescue, the Afghans see the approaching soldiers and prudently melt back into the hills. Winkie and Miss Allardyce are brought back to the post, where Winkie is hailed as "a pukka hero"; his breaking arrest is forgiven, and he even regains his Good Conduct Badge.

Needless to say, in Ernest Pascal and Julien Josephson's screenplay nearly all of this was changed. Percival was changed to Priscilla and given a widowed American mother (June Lang). The colonel backs up a generation, becoming Priscilla's grandfather (C. Aubrey Smith), who sends for Priscilla and her mother when he learns they are living in poverty in America. Priscilla is still nicknamed Wee Willie Winkie, but her military discipline is self-imposed in an effort to become a soldier, since that seems to be the only type of person her grandfather the colonel likes. "Private" Winkie still takes a shine to Lt. "Coppy" Brandis (Michael Whalen, Shirley's father in Poor Little Rich Girl), but he throws over Maj. Allardyce's daughter to romance Winkie's mother. While he's doing that, Coppy's duties as Winkie's best friend among the soldiery devolve onto a new character, Sergeant MacDuff (Victor McLaglen).

In the closest Wee Willie Winkie comes to Kipling, young Pvt. Winkie again bravely faces and scolds an array of scornfully unassimilated Afghans, in this case led by the proud warlord Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero). But the movie goes Kipling one better: Winkie even averts a frontier war and brings peace when her grandfather Col. Williams and Khoda Khan agree to resolve their differences for the child's sake.

It's not uncommon these days to hear Wee Willie Winkie described as Shirley's best picture at 20th Century Fox -- and John Ford's worst. As for Ford, he would go on to direct Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley for Darryl Zanuck, winning Oscars for the latter two. To be sure, Wee Willie Winkie isn't in the same league with any of those. But the worst? Hardly. Take a gander at Tobacco Road, When Willie Comes Marching Home or What Price Glory sometime.

But Shirley's best? Well, here those folks may be on to something. Ford, Pascal and Josephson followed Zanuck's orders to write a role and "let Shirley adapt herself" to it, and not to depend on any of her tricks. She pouts but little (and only when called for), never breaks into dance, and sings only once, a couple of choruses of "Auld Lang Syne" at the bedside of Sgt. MacDuff as he lies mortally wounded after a skirmish with Khoda Khan's men. The scene is a famous one, and justly so; it may be the best-played scene of Shirley's entire career, staged and composed with masterful restraint by Ford and quietly scored by Alfred Newman. Winkie has no idea that MacDuff is dying; the knowledge has been kept from her. As she sings we see conflicting emotions flit across her face -- affection for her good friend, confusion at the sense that something's not right with him, then a banishing of the confusion, persuading herself that he's only fallen asleep.

In Child Star Shirley devoted more space to Wee Willie Winkie than to any of her other pictures -- partly because labor unrest was roiling the studio during production (the studio even shifted the shooting schedule, sending the company off for several weeks of location work at Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley while demonstrations at the studio gates blew over), partly because her mother underwent surgery for a benign tumor during that time. But mostly it was because Wee Willie Winkie was her favorite, at least in retrospect. "Of all my films," she wrote, "I rate Wee Willie Winkie the best, but for all the wrong reasons. It was best because of its manual of arms, the noisy marching around in military garb with brass buttons, my kilts bouncing. It was best because of daredevil stunts with snipers and stampeding horses. It was also best because I finally seemed to earn the professional respect of someone so blood-and-thunder macho as Ford."

That respect was a while in coming. Try as she might at first, Shirley couldn't charm Ford or coax him into collegial conversation. Where other directors had dandled her on their knees, he would merely stride past chewing on his handkerchief, ignoring her when he wasn't giving her carefully detailed and specific direction, as if he didn't trust her to do things right. Ford began to thaw when he saw how eagerly she embraced the close-order drill called for in the script, then a little more when he noticed how she didn't flinch in the face of a rearing stunt-horse (remember that pony on the set of To the Last Man?) or a marksman shooting out a lamp over her head (actually, Ford wanted Winkie to flinch that time; the shot had to be redone). The clincher was this scene, a potentially dangerous shot of Winkie scampering to safety out of the path of a stampeding herd of horses, which Shirley volunteered to do without a double. No doubt about it, the kid had guts. Eleven years later, when they worked together on Fort Apache, Shirley would ask Ford to stand godfather for her first child, and he would agree.

In my notes on Captain January I quoted Graham Greene's review in the London Spectator, in which he mentioned Shirley's "oddly precocious body", as voluptuous as Marlene Dietrich and "interestingly decadent". Over Wee Willie Winkie he crossed a line. Writing in the highbrow magazine Night and Day (which he co-edited) on October 28, 1937, he said:

"The owners of a child star are like leaseholders -- their property diminishes in value every year...Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

"It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers -- middle-aged men and clergymen -- respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."

Greene closed out with a left-handed compliment, noting that the story was "a long way after Kipling. But we needn't be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood's is the better."

Fox was less than mollified; they sued for libel, charging that Greene had accused the studio of "procuring" Shirley "for immoral purposes". Greene fled to Mexico, and the British court found for the plaintiffs, ordering damages of 3,500 pounds sterling, 500 of it to come from Greene personally. (The amount of the judgment was about $17,500 at the time; multiply by 20 to get an approximation of the amount in today's dollars.) From Mexico Greene wrote his Night and Day colleague Elizabeth Bowen: "I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to agree to apologise to that little bitch Shirley Temple -- so I suppose the case has now been settled with the maximum publicity." In Child Star Shirley wrote about the dust-up with some amusement, noting that at the time the whole thing had gone pretty much over her head.

Students of Graham Greene's prose have spent decades parsing Greene's review, digging for his intent. Some say he was kidding ("Shirley Temple = Marlene Dietrich? Seriously?"), others that he was satirizing Shirley's handlers or her audience. Still others contend that Greene was obviously right, that the sexualization of Shirley Temple on Fox's part was conscious and deliberate ("I'm obsessed with sex?? You're the one showing me all these dirty pictures!"). Personally, I won't weigh in on all that -- except to say that very often, a review tells us more about the reviewer than it does about the work under discussion.

In any event, other reviews were more circumspect, if hardly more complimentary. The New Yorker's John Mosher, sniffy as ever, sniffed, "Miss Temple's talent is rather overexploited at times, and she seems just a bit too pert. Mr. Kipling's children were never allowed to take over the platform in quite this fashion." Variety's "Flin" liked the picture well enough, but tempered his opinion (as Variety often did) with marketing advice, saying that "as a roadshow attraction at advanced admission prices, 'Winkie' is too long for the continuous type of film theatres. Temple is boxoffice dynamite because of the kids who flock to see her, but youngsters can't sit still for an hour and three-quarters. They're squirming all over the place; however, reducing footage for general exhibition will be easy. It also is essential." And the New York Times's Frank S. Nugent ended his cease-fire, which had begun with Stowaway: "The picture, on its unassuming and frankly sentimental surface, is a pleasing enough little fiction, sure to delight every Temple addict and likely to win the grudging approval even of those who, like myself, are biding their time until she grows up, becomes gawky and is a has-been at 15."

Seen today, Wee Willie Winkie bears out Shirley's opinion more than it does Mosher's, Flin's or Nugent's. The picture is certainly not too long. Children may squirm during the protracted love scenes between Michael Whalen and June Lang, but so do adults. Both were bland Fox contract players on an unstoppable career path toward B pictures and, at the onset of middle age, television. Whalen's dark good looks were about to be rendered irrelevant by the rise of the far more charismatic Tyrone Power. As for Lang (Shirley's "mother" was only 11 years older than she was), within seven years she would be a nameless, uncredited "Goldwyn Girl" behind Danny Kaye in Up in Arms, and would finish her career with one-off guest shots on TV cop shows in the '50s and '60s. Whalen and Lang were (and remain) attractive and inoffensive, but they lack the chemistry -- with either the audience or each other -- that Robert Young and Alice Faye showed in Stowaway, or Faye and Jack Haley in Poor Little Rich Girl. (The blue-green of this frame-cap, like the sepia of others, reproduces the tinted stock Wee Willie Winkie sported on its original release.)

John Ford was probably no more interested in Lang and Whalen's romantic subplot than we are today. What he emphasized in Wee Willie Winkie was the theme he would later explore more deeply, and more famously, in his "cavalry trilogy" of 1948-50 (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande): military life on an often hostile frontier, with an almost fetishistic reverence for its rugged pomp and pageantry. And in the chemistry department, Wee Willie Winkie makes up in Victor McLaglen, C. Aubrey Smith and Cesar Romero what it lacks in June Lang and Michael Whalen. As Scott Eyman astutely notes in his biography of Ford, the on-screen relationship between McLaglen's Sgt. MacDuff and Pvt. Winkie mirrors the one between Ford and Shirley between takes: "eye-rolling impatience at the thought of being saddled with such a ridiculous apparition, followed by grudging respect, ending in a protective friendship." C. Aubrey Smith brings a British lion's dignity to the now-standard role of curmudgeon for Shirley to win over. And Romero's Khoda Khan, like the American Indians in Ford's later trilogy, is an adversary, even an antagonist, without ever becoming a villain.

A key difference between Wee Willie Winkie and the cavalry trilogy, of course, and what makes it particularly appealing, is that we see the story not through the eyes of John Wayne or Henry Fonda or Maureen O'Hara, but through those of an eight-year-old American girl who comes to love the panoply and close-order drill just as much as her crusty old grandfather does. Like the Winkie in Kipling's original story, the movie's female version becomes the mascot and hero(ine) of the regiment, and she returns their respect and affection.

For Shirley's next picture, 20th Century Fox would once again mine the deep vein of 19th century European literature. This time, however, Darryl Zanuck appears to have had second thoughts about his determination not to rely on any of Shirley's tricks.

To be continued...

.

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 9

During shooting on Poor Little Rich Girl, director Irving Cummings drew Shirley's mother aside and warned her that (as Shirley recalled it in Child Star) "the studio would have to find better stories for me; I had lost that baby quality and was getting an emotional understanding, 'like Helen Hayes when she started.'" Cummings's point was well taken, but like contract players at other studios, Shirley was at the mercy of the 20th Century Fox front office, and their interest was in keeping her a baby as long as possible. Certainly that was how they played it for her next picture.

Dimples (released October 11, 1936)

I'm going to pass over Dimples as quickly as duty will allow because, like Now and Forever, it's a bit of a dud, and for similar reasons. The setting is New York in 1850; Shirley plays Chalvia Dolores Appleby, known by all as "Dimples". As in Now and Forever, she's the child of an unregenerate grifter, only this time it's not her father but her grandfather, "Professor" Eustace Appleby (Frank Morgan). The Professor calls himself a music teacher of "the Pianoforte, the Bugle, the Melodion, the Drum, also Bird Calls", but mainly he just stands in the crowd shilling while Dimples and his other "students" sing, dance and play their instruments in the streets. Then he starts the contributions when Dimples passes the hat and, while other bystanders are dropping coins in, he works the crowd picking pockets. In another similarity to Now and Forever, Dimples catches the eye of wealthy old Mrs. Drew (Helen Westley), who wants to lift her out of the Bowery poverty in which she lives with the Professor. At the same time, Mrs. Drew becomes estranged from her nephew Allen (Robert Kent) when he becomes romantically involved with (gasp!) an actress whom he decides to star in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin -- in which he later hires Dimples to play Little Eva.

Unlike Shirley's character in Now and Forever, Dimples is wise to her reprobate forebear and goes out of her way to shield him. When he steals a clock from Mrs. Drew's house, she returns it, telling the kind lady that she stole it and the Professor made her bring it back. When Allen Drew wants to hire Dimples for Uncle Tom's Cabin but has no part for the Professor, she turns the role down until he agrees to give the Professor a job. In this way and others, the Professor becomes the child and Dimples the guardian. 

In Child Star Shirley remembered Frank Morgan's tireless efforts to upstage her and steal focus during their scenes -- fiddling with his cuffs, flourishing his handkerchief, placing his stovepipe hat on a table between her and the camera so that she couldn't be in the shot without stepping off her mark and out of the light. ("Both of us knew perfectly well what he was doing. There was no way I could cope, short of biting at his fingers.") Director William A. Seiter was on to Morgan's tricks too; in this scene, where Dimples sings "Picture Me Without You" (one of four pleasantly forgettable songs provided by Jimmy McHugh and Ted Koehler), Seiter made Morgan sit in a chair with his back to the camera. ("When this picture is over," cracked producer Nunnally Johnson, "either Shirley will have acquired a taste for Scotch whiskey or Frank will come out with curls.")

Shirley's consternation is understandable, but the problem with the Professor isn't Morgan's performance -- he's as delightful as ever -- it's the character. The man is simply no damn good. There isn't an honest bone in his body; every word that passes his lips is a lie, and he'll steal anything that isn't bolted to the floor. He never makes the slightest effort to reform the way Gary Cooper's Jerry Day tries to do in Now and Forever -- at least not until the waning seconds of the picture, when it comes much too late to be convincing. Variety's reviewer "Odec" described the Professor as "Micawberish", but that's a slander on the great character from David Copperfield. Wilkins Micawber is merely feckless and improvident; Eustace Appleby is what later generations would call a sociopath and pathological narcissist -- Robert Kent's Allen Drew is much closer to the mark when he denounces the Professor as a "senile old scoundrel." On top of that, he's stupid, and Dimples's frequent efforts to cover for him (which convince no one) only make her look like a fool. The Professor's bumbling perfidy casts a sour pall over every scene he's in, and Frank Morgan, despite his skill at stealing scenes (maybe even because of it), is powerless to make this good-for-nothing tinhorn Fagin likeable.

Dimples does have its pluses. Bill Robinson, doing off-camera duty this time as dance director, gave Shirley some sprightly syncopated routines, like this one here to McHugh and Koehler's "He Was a Dandy", flanked by Thurman Black and Jesse Scott. The picture sports a few anachronisms. It's explicitly set in 1850, but it opens on a shot of a campaign poster for Franklin Pierce and involves a stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin; both Pierce's election and the novel's publication didn't happen until 1852. Still, there's a nice period feel to it, and the glimpse of the 1850s American theater is pretty authentic. Maybe too authentic -- the play's Uncle Tom and Topsy (and, for plot reasons, Frank Morgan) appear in blackface, as do such genuine African Americans as Stepin Fetchit and the Hall Johnson Choir (in those days even people of color, on the rare occasions they were allowed to perform with whites, were required to "black up").

Neither "Odec" in Variety nor Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times was overly impressed with Dimples. Odec assured exhibitors that they'd make money as usual on Shirley's latest, "but it won't be due to the fact that 'Dimples' is solid, expertly fashioned entertainment. It's anything but that." Nugent, for his part, was downright exasperated: "Why they bother with titles, or with plots either for that matter, is beyond us...Now leave us alone a while; we want to brood."

Just one more point about Dimples before we move on. In Child Star Shirley recalled filming Little Eva's death scene (which she plays much the way a child actress in the 1850s would probably have done it), and actor Paul Stanton, as Eva's grieving father, sobbing so broadly that he shook the bed she was lying on. However, Shirley transplanted the recollection from Dimples to The Little Colonel the year before, and she identified her over-emoting stage father as John Lodge, who played her "real" father in that picture. Such are the occasional vagaries of even the most reliable memory.

Stowaway (released December 18, 1936)

Stowaway gave Shirley an exotic setting, a story that didn't require her to carry the show all by herself, and cast-mates who were strong enough to share the load. Shirley played Barbara Stewart, nicknamed "Ching-Ching", the orphaned daughter of missionaries in Sanchow, China. At the approach of bandits from the hills, she's about to be orphaned again -- or worse -- because her guardians the Kruikshanks (also missionaries) refuse to flee from the approaching marauders. Defying them, the wise local magistrate Sun Lo (Philip Ahn) spirits Ching-Ching away with a boatman to Shanghai.

But upon arrival, the boatman robs the sleeping Ching-Ching and disappears, leaving her to wander the city alone. That's how she meets Tommy Randall (Robert Young, on loan from MGM), a wandering American playboy. After their encounter, the girl falls asleep in the rumble seat of Tommy's automobile while he goes roaring off on a drunk with another wealthy globetrotter (Eugene Pallette). Tommy's valet Atkins (Arthur Treacher) tracks his employer from bar to bar and manages to get him aboard their departing ship safe and (reasonably) sound, along with Tommy's auto -- and, unbeknownst to all, the sleeping Ching-Ching.

When the befuddled Ching-Ching awakens the next morning, she's immediately spotted for a stowaway and chased from deck to deck. She takes refuge in the stateroom of Susan Parker (Alice Faye) and Susan's future mother-in-law Mrs. Hope (Helen Westley), on their way to Bangkok to join Susan's intended. Before long, Ching-Ching is reunited with her "Uncle" Tommy; for his part, Tommy agrees to stand good for the child's passage until her guardians can be contacted. Also, even through his pounding hangover, he can see that Susan is the most beautiful woman aboard ship. Susan's eyes are clearer than his, but it's plain to see that the attraction is mutual.

On the voyage from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Ching-Ching plays unwitting matchmaker between Tommy and Susan, to the consternation of Mrs. Hope, who urgently cables her son Richard (Allan Lane) not to wait till they reach Bangkok but to fly at once to meet the boat at Hong Kong. The ever-obedient Richard does as he's told, and the inevitable romantic complications arise, with Susan eventually cold-shouldering Tommy when she mistakenly thinks he has returned to his ne'er-do-well ways. In the meantime, the ship's captain (Robert Greig) learns from the American consulate that Ching-Ching's guardians the Kruikshanks have paid with their lives for their refusal to flee those approaching bandits; the child will have to be returned to Shanghai and the orphanage there.

Tommy persuades Susan to adopt Ching-Ching when she and Richard are married, promising to take the child off their hands as soon as his lawyers can arrange it. But Richard, under the influence of his domineering mother, will have none of it; he sees no reason to do Tommy any favors and he doesn't give a hoot about Ching-Ching. Shocked by his (actually, their) callous attitude, Susan breaks the engagement. Soon thereafter, Tommy, seeing Ching-Ching about to be sent off to a life of "marching in lock-step and eating gruel", desperately begs Susan to marry him -- in name only, he assures her, just so he can adopt Ching-Ching, with a quickie Reno divorce and a generous settlement for Susan as soon as they reach the States.

Well, we can all guess where this is headed, and sure enough it gets there -- with a wise judge in Reno (J. Edward Bromberg) consulting with Ching-Ching before denying a divorce petition for probably the first time in the history of the State of Nevada.

Stowaway reunited Shirley with director William A. Seiter (and also with writer William Conselman, who had done so well by Shirley on Bright Eyes and The Little Colonel, writing this time with Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, from a story by Samuel G. Engel). Without the odious Professor who blighted Dimples (and without Frank Morgan's upstaging stunts), Seiter was able to do much better by Shirley, mainly by not forcing her to be the whole show.

Not that she doesn't have plenty to do. Ching-Ching is still the fulcrum of the plot, as Marky was in Little Miss Marker, serving as matchmaker for Robert Young and Alice Faye almost exactly the way Marky did for Adolphe Menjou and Dorothy Dell. And life in a remote village deep in the heart of China hasn't deprived Ching-Ching of a keen grasp of American popular music (which she credits to "Sun Lo's phonograph"): When she visits an amateur-hour theater in Hong Kong with Tommy and Susan, Ching-Ching takes the stage to sing "You Gotta S-M-I-L-E to Be H-A-Double-P-Y" (by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel). Then she reprises the song in the style of Al Jolson, then Eddie Cantor (that's some record collection that Sun Lo has!) -- and finally a la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with a white-tie-and-tails dummy strapped to her toes that just happens to be sitting backstage.

Stowaway's take-away hit was Gordon and Revel's "Good Night, My Love" -- introduced by Shirley as a lullaby learned at her late mother's knee, then later reprised by Alice as a love song, with a new "grown-up" lyric. (In Child Star Shirley confessed to a private, childish jealousy over Alice getting the last word on "her" song. "Instantly I knew her rendition had finessed mine. Hers was deeper-throated, more resonant, and her facial expressions insinuated much that I sensed was important without knowing why." Could this be a glimpse of conditions on the set that would lead Alice decades later to speak of "that Temple child"?) 

Alice also sang "One Never Knows, Does One?", another one by Gordon and Revel, this time with no little-girl version for Shirley. Then Shirley closed out the show with "That's What I Want for Christmas", written by the uncredited Gerald Marks and Irving Caesar. This last number comes at the very end, after the story has been brought to a satisfying conclusion, and it plays almost like a curtain-call encore. Evidently it was added at the last minute to exploit the movie's holiday engagement at New York's Roxy picture palace (it didn't sift down to the rest of the country until after the turn of 1937).

Reviews of Stowaway were a big step up. Variety's "Bige" called it "a nifty Shirley Temple comedy with musical trimmings" and said it was "apt to regain whatever ground has been lost by the kid star's last few efforts." (For the record, Shirley's "last few efforts" had been Dimples, Poor Little Rich Girl, Captain January, The Littlest Rebel and Curly Top. Apparently Dimples had left a really bad taste.)

At the New York Times, Stowaway appears to have restored Frank S. Nugent's faith in both 20th Century Fox and Shirley in particular ("[a] clever little baggage when she is kept in her place..."). "For the first time in several starts," he wrote, "she has an amusing script behind her, an agreeable adult troupe with her and a clever director before her. The combination has produced a thoroughly entertaining romantic comedy, unquestionably the best thing the gifted moppet has done since 'Little Miss Marker.' It practically convinces us there is a Santa Claus." Even John Mosher, at that citadel of sniffy sophistication The New Yorker, conceded, "I am sure that this new film of [Miss Temple's] should be the bright spot, perhaps the brightest spot, of the holiday season for her great following."

Stowaway is indeed a charmer, the more so since Shirley doesn't have to supply all the charm. Robert Young and Alice Faye have a playful romantic chemistry, and he's in good comic form while she's in excellent voice; Arthur Treacher is amusing as Tommy Randall's valet, in a state of perpetual nonplussedness; Helen Westley, as the old harridan Mrs. Hope, offers a clever change from her cuddly matron in Dimples; Eugene Pallete is, as always, a hoot playing a shipboard lush (albeit too briefly this time); and as the ship's captain, Robert Greig -- that stalwart Australian character actor whom audiences are always happy to see but whose name they can never remember -- adds his own patented grace notes of dignity.

Watching Shirley's movies in succession today, something is beginning to make itself noticeable by the time one gets to Stowaway, and it bears on Irving Cummings's remark to Mother Gertrude about Shirley "losing that baby quality and getting an emotional understanding." Remember, at this point it's been just a hair over three years since the day Shirley auditioned for Lew Brown and Jay Gorney on Stand Up and Cheer!; since then Shirley has made 15 pictures. She's no longer a toddler, as Cummings noted, and as for "emotional understanding", she has certainly come to understand how cute she is. She has by no means lost the "spontaneity and cheer" that Mordaunt Hall noticed in Little Miss Marker, or the "unspoiled freshness of manner" that Andre Sennwald found the saving grace of Now and Forever. But she no longer has the element of surprise on her side, and from her mother's coaching her to "sparkle" she's begun to develop tricks: the carefully calculated giggle, the pumping fists, the pouting lips -- the mannerisms that have provided fodder for countless parodists since the 1930s. 

This is noticeable now only by viewing in rapid succession (and closely, and more than a few times) the movies that audiences in the mid-'30s saw only once, and spread out over years. But Darryl Zanuck had already noticed it himself, and he decided to shake up the formula a little before it got too stale. And so it was that Shirley, for the first time in her career, got the opportunity to star for a truly great director.

To be continued...

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