Now that we have dealt with the best movie Temple made as a tot, the Siren wants to deal with something that comes up one whole hell of a lot when you discuss Shirley Temple. A while back the Siren posted about movie quotes she didn't want to hear anymore. After spending a couple of weeks researching Shirley and Wee Willie Winkie, she would now include Graham Greene's observations about the relationship between Temple, her movies' "daddy" figures and the composition of her fan base.
Everyone knows the story of Greene's review and the furious reaction it inspired, but for ages the subsequent litigation meant the precise passage was hard to find. The Siren encountered it in its entirety only about 18 months ago, via David Ehrenstein and the wonders of the Internet. Here it is--the "libelous" passage from a review of the Ford film:
The contemporary reaction to this review was way overdone, and the Siren vehemently disapproves of trying to suppress speech. As is true of many libel cases, if Temple's parents hadn't sued to get this paragraph out of the public discourse, it might have lapsed into obscurity. Instead it's immortal.
Greene was a genius all right, one who wrote the screenplays for two of the Siren's most deeply and dearly loved films. But the Siren finds his film criticism a chore. The style is there, but good lord he can be snooty, like he when he informed readers that if they were watching High, Wide and Handsome, a Rouben Mamoulian musical in which Irene Dunne plays a scene with a horse, they would be able to pick out Dunne by looking for "the one without the white patch on her forehead." (All right, yes, it's funny, but my beloved Irene was NOT horsey-looking.) No great film critic should give the persistent impression he's slumming. The Siren also scratches her head over aspects of Greene's taste. He couldn't stand Hitchcock, and his review of My Man Godfrey is so humorless it becomes hilarious. It is probably also worth noting, with regard to the Winkie review, that Greene was described as "obsessed with sex" by no less an authority on that state of being than Otto Preminger.
In the passage above, Greene complains about the "adult emotions" on Temple's face, and ignores the fact that Temple's ability to show deep feeling was neither inconsistent with childhood, nor evidence of corruption; it was simply what made her a great screen actress. Especially now that she's re-watched Wee Willie Winkie, the Siren sees the review as more bitchy than subversive, the moan of a highly intellectual man who cannot believe he just had to sit through that, that tripe. Never mind the millions of kids who adored Temple as much as did any adult. If she's popular, it must be because she wiggles her ass.
Sure, you can read Shirley Temple movies Greene's way if such is your kinky wont; but there's a few that lend themselves to it far more readily than the John Ford film. Little Miss Marker comes to mind, mostly because Adolphe Menjou is so much creepier than Victor McLaglen. In fact, you can read a lot of child vehicles of that or any other era as sublimated sex, and sometimes you'll be right. But it's a tiresomely reductive view to take of a film as good as Wee Willie Winkie, and it diminishes the good points something like The Little Princess or The Littlest Rebel still possess.
So if you want an analysis of the incestuous/pedophilic qualities of Wee Willie Winkie, that's as much as you're going to get from the Siren. She doesn't think the movie, or indeed Temple's performance, deserved that review.
Everyone knows the story of Greene's review and the furious reaction it inspired, but for ages the subsequent litigation meant the precise passage was hard to find. The Siren encountered it in its entirety only about 18 months ago, via David Ehrenstein and the wonders of the Internet. Here it is--the "libelous" passage from a review of the Ford film:
The owners of a child star are like leaseholders--their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has a 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 that is only 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.
The contemporary reaction to this review was way overdone, and the Siren vehemently disapproves of trying to suppress speech. As is true of many libel cases, if Temple's parents hadn't sued to get this paragraph out of the public discourse, it might have lapsed into obscurity. Instead it's immortal.
Greene was a genius all right, one who wrote the screenplays for two of the Siren's most deeply and dearly loved films. But the Siren finds his film criticism a chore. The style is there, but good lord he can be snooty, like he when he informed readers that if they were watching High, Wide and Handsome, a Rouben Mamoulian musical in which Irene Dunne plays a scene with a horse, they would be able to pick out Dunne by looking for "the one without the white patch on her forehead." (All right, yes, it's funny, but my beloved Irene was NOT horsey-looking.) No great film critic should give the persistent impression he's slumming. The Siren also scratches her head over aspects of Greene's taste. He couldn't stand Hitchcock, and his review of My Man Godfrey is so humorless it becomes hilarious. It is probably also worth noting, with regard to the Winkie review, that Greene was described as "obsessed with sex" by no less an authority on that state of being than Otto Preminger.
In the passage above, Greene complains about the "adult emotions" on Temple's face, and ignores the fact that Temple's ability to show deep feeling was neither inconsistent with childhood, nor evidence of corruption; it was simply what made her a great screen actress. Especially now that she's re-watched Wee Willie Winkie, the Siren sees the review as more bitchy than subversive, the moan of a highly intellectual man who cannot believe he just had to sit through that, that tripe. Never mind the millions of kids who adored Temple as much as did any adult. If she's popular, it must be because she wiggles her ass.
Sure, you can read Shirley Temple movies Greene's way if such is your kinky wont; but there's a few that lend themselves to it far more readily than the John Ford film. Little Miss Marker comes to mind, mostly because Adolphe Menjou is so much creepier than Victor McLaglen. In fact, you can read a lot of child vehicles of that or any other era as sublimated sex, and sometimes you'll be right. But it's a tiresomely reductive view to take of a film as good as Wee Willie Winkie, and it diminishes the good points something like The Little Princess or The Littlest Rebel still possess.
So if you want an analysis of the incestuous/pedophilic qualities of Wee Willie Winkie, that's as much as you're going to get from the Siren. She doesn't think the movie, or indeed Temple's performance, deserved that review.
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