The Little Girl Who Fought The Great Depression: Shirley Temple And 1930s America by John F. Kasson

Author:John F. Kasson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, United States, 20th Century, Entertainment & Performing Arts, History
ISBN: 9780393240795
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Shirley works as a scullery maid in a production still for The Little Princess. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

In addition to talented character actors, several veterans of Shirley Temple films among them, the cast included South African–born Sybil Jason as Becky, the cockney scullery maid at Miss Minchin’s who becomes Sara’s devoted friend. Almost exactly Shirley’s age and height, she delighted the film crew with her accomplished cockney speech. Shirley, who did not attempt to alter her American accent, apart from her rendition with Arthur Treacher of the music-hall song “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road,” later confessed jealousy at Sybil’s appeal. Shirley effectively channeled this envy to another target in the memorably naughty scene—unusual in her roles—in which she is goaded beyond endurance by the spiteful taunts of a snobbish schoolmate and dumps a scuttle of coal ashes on her head.55

The Little Princess had a running time of ninety-one minutes, longer than any previous Shirley Temple film except Wee Willie Winkie. Lavishly produced and luminously filmed in Technicolor, it was Shirley’s most expensive vehicle to that time. At its release, Zanuck led the ballyhoo, calling it “the finest picture with which I have ever been associated.”56

No critic went this far, but Nelson Bell in the Washington Post proclaimed The Little Princess “Shirley Temple’s best picture to date.” He applauded the rich color, the dream ballet, the supporting cast, and Shirley’s own performance. Yet he could not resist deriding “the attempt to make the prodigious Miss Temple, with her round face and plump little body, serve as the symbol of persecution and the victim of deprivation that verges close to the borders of starvation.” Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune expressed similar delight. “They say she’s at the awkward age,” she noted. “Nonsense. Shirley Temple will never have an awkward age!”57

Despite the success of The Little Princess, Gertrude Temple continued to chafe at the roles in which Zanuck cast her daughter. “No more backstairs waifs,” she insisted. The time had come for Shirley to portray the “everyday problems of a child.” Instead of settling for mediocre ratings, Shirley would either regain her place at the “top of the heap” or make “a graceful exit.”58 Zanuck ignored these demands, placing Shirley in another familiar situation, as the difference between his and the Temple family’s conceptions of Shirley’s career widened to a chasm.

In Susannah of the Mounties, Shirley continued the work of healing on behalf of imperial Britain begun in Wee Willie Winkie and pursued in The Little Princess, this time on Canada’s western frontier. Once again, she is already an orphan as the story begins, the sole survivor of a Blackfoot Indian attack. Scooped up by a handsome Mountie (Randolph Scott), she becomes the pet of the men on a military post. Like a B western, the movie included a young Indian boy, a noble Indian chief (played by the former Yiddish-theater actor Maurice Moscovitch in redface), and treacherous Indians and settlers in roughly equal measure, who together propel events to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.