IN MEMORIAM -- SHIRLEY TEMPLE: a study of 4 of her 1940s films

Shirley Temple, born in 1928 and died in February 2014, had a life story that frankly reads like fiction – except it really did happen. 

In the early 1930s she made educational movies for tikes.   In the early 1930s, William Fox signed her to a contract.  Fox Studio and Twentieth Century Fox Studio turned her into a child superstar.  Her movies were heavy on optimism amid hard times and sometimes had musical elements.   She made a huge fortune for Twentieth Century Fox. 

In the 1950s, she became an early participant in television.   Her second marriage lasted a long time by any standards.

In the 1960s and 1970s she had a diplomatic career, serving in two countries as an ambassador and eventually as the chief of protocol.   Very few stars – John Gavin and Sidney Poitier come to mind – served as ambassadors, though at least three  – Irene Dunne [who was also a Knight of Malta], Danny Kaye, and Audrey Hepburn – served either as ambassadors or delegates associated with the United Nations. 

When she died, she was the senior living recipient of an Academy Award, an honorary award for the film work she did 80 years ago this year.  She was 6 when AMPAS bestowed it. 

Of the movies she made as a child, my personal favorite happens to be Walter Lang’s The Blue Bird  (20th Century Fox 1940), one of her few three-strip Technicolor films, Fox’s answer to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (MGM 1939).   It contains a vision of pre-mortal heaven that features boy spirits dressed in short blue togas and girl spirits dressed in shorter pink togas being sent to Earth in a spiritual galleon.  No kidding.    The Blue Bird is delightfully berserk, an eye-popping film fantasy based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play.  It was Shirley’s biggest flop of a child star vehicle: unlike Oz, it has not make grundles of money in re-release.

Little credible evidence suggests Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer really did try to borrow her for the role of “Dorothy” in Oz.   Producer Mervyn LeRoy and studio head Louis B Mayer were, practically from the beginning, sold on casting Judy Garland as Dorothy.  

Her father squandered the money she made at Fox, though her mother seems stable enough.

This bring me to Shirley’s career in the 1940s when she was a teenager / young adult.    She was not quite as big a superstar in this period, but she made four fascinating pictures.   They illustrate a number of points about film making in the 1940s and America in general. 

When Shirley left 20th Century Fox, MGM signed her to a contract, but could not decide what to do with a larger more-mature Shirley Temple.   David O Selznick signed her to a personal contract as well, and also found her problematic to cast.   He loaned her to a number of films, made only one movie with her, and eventually told her she should move to Europe and change her name for professional purposes.  Fortunately, she had the sense not to do that. 

In 1943, David O Selznick cast Shirley in his production of Since You Went Away, directed by John Cromwell.   The movie proposes to show the year 1943 as lived by an average American family trying to make due somewhere in Ohio during World War II while the father of house is conscripted to the United States military.   This average family consisted of Claudette Colbert as the mother, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as the teenage daughters, Monty Wooley as a boarder, Joseph Cotten as mother’s boyfriend, and Hattie McDaniel as the housekeeper.  If there were many average families like that in Ohio or anywhere else in 1943 USA, I would be darned surprised.   The oldest daughter falls in love with a soldier portrayed by Robert Walker, which only compounds the idealization – and Selznick fell in love with Jones which complicated his  home life. 

In 1947, Dore Shary cast Shirley in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, one of the most berserk comedies made in that period.   Try to top this as a story.   Cary Grant, very fit and very charming, portrays a bachelor artist who visits a high school to lecture and winds up attracting the attention of high-school student Shirley who develops a yen for him.  He somehow does something in relation to that student that winds him up before a municipal judge, who happens to be said girl student’s big sister.  Myrna Loy portrayed Big Sister.   

At this point the plot gets sort of farfetched.  Loy was old enough to be Temple’s mother and was older than Grant.  If big sister was indeed a female municipal judge [ very rare in 1947 ], how did someone supposedly that young credibly land such a position?   Well, never mind.  Chalk it up to willing suspension of disbelief.   Maybe we can overlook that.  Judge Big Sister sentences artist to community service involving little sister, which seems just too weird — even if Big Sister hopes that little sister will tire of him.   Who would tire of Cary Grant?  Not me – and not Big Sister who develops a yen for him, too.  The plot thickened like concrete.

Sidney Sheldon, of all people, helped write this elaborate piffle.  He was in his Hollywood days before he created and wrote I Dream of Jeannie for NBC-TV in 1965 and before he started churning out huge sexy romance novels that became megahits in book stores.   AMPAS even awarded him an Oscar for best writing that year.  
               
Also In 1947, Shirley starred in That Hagen Girl, which was her first film role as a young women –  not a kid.   Ronald Reagan portrayed her first adult boyfriend.  It is a fascinating combination given their later histories.   During World War II, Reagan did his military service in Hollywood making war education films and propaganda films.  No actors came out of The War with as complete an understanding of Hollywood’s political power structure as he did.  Only Robert Montgomery came close, and he eventually became the media consultant to President Eisenhower.  In this period, Reagan became the president of the Screen Actors Guild.  Reagan eventually became a governor and President of the United States.  Temple eventually had a diplomatic career.  Reagan was a natural choice to be Our Shirley’s first adult beau:   as one critic said of him at the time, “He has a cheery way of looking at dames.”

In 1948, John Ford and Merian C. Cooper cast Shirley in Ford’s big Monument Valley western Fort Apache.  Ford directed Shirley as a tike in the 1930s; but in the 1940s, given his eccentric personality, he seems an iffy choice to direct her.  Actually she did well by him; she turns out one of the memorable performances in that memorable film.   She never worked with Ford again –  though and she could have if either he or Shirley had wanted.  

John Wayne co-stars in this film with Henry Fonda, who portrays just about the most disreputable, unlikable villain of a United States army officer Ford ever created in a movie.   He comes Out West to a fort with injun troubles and starts running it into the ground.  Shirley portrays his almost-grown daughter who accompanies him.  He is a widower, or something.  One way or another, he has no wife.   He named this daughter “Philadelphia” which congers up all sorts of images of what type of person this man is.   Meanwhile, daughter gets herself in trouble with an enlisted soldier whose enlisted father and civilian-mother happen to live and work in this fort.   The Colonel is incensed that she would start a relationship with an enlisted man instead of a commissioned officer or someone associated with a commissioned officer.  The boy’s father is unhappy with the situation too; being a good Army sergeant, he knows his place.   

Philadelphia soon disappears from the film.  Her father leads troops on a mission that turns into something along the lines of Custer’s Last Stand.  It is his fault, and he dies with everyone else.  The movie ends with John Wayne spinning a yarn about him for the benefit of an Eastern newspaper reporter.   Ford’s view is factual evidence is not history; the story, not the facts,  counts in recounting America’s greatness.  It is one of the most unsettling ends to a Ford movie, but it says a lot about the sort of history we get in school.    It remains one of the most Fordian of Ford’s films. 

Shirley had an incredible career as a kid, but she found a way to improve with age.   Not every kid star can say that.   Will Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton ever become ambassadors?  Shirley Temple's 1940s films illustrate many points still useful to know even today.