The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (27 page)

Because Zanuck’s
The Blue Bird
was to be, first and foremost, a Shirley Temple vehicle, Shirley’s Mytyl became the dominant sibling, and Tyltyl was demoted to the position of her younger brother. Even so, to retain Tyltyl as a character at all represented a significant innovation in the Shirley Temple formula. Never before had another child been paired with her throughout the story, and the boy assigned to the role of Tyltyl, six-year-old Johnny Russell, was notably talented and cute. Gertrude Temple, who always warily eyed potential rivals for Shirley’s limelight, tried to have him replaced. Through the elaborate chain of communication she argued that Shirley needed someone her own age. “Ridiculous,” Zanuck replied, maintaining that a boy the same age would naturally be the leader. As her younger brother, he would naturally rely on her guidance and example.
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Gertrude and George Temple lodged other objections as well. Although Shirley was the movie’s star, they protested, no one reading the script would guess so. They invidiously compared her part to Judy Garland’s in
The Wizard of Oz
, the film that cast its shadow over the entire undertaking. With asperity, Zanuck replied that Shirley’s part was larger than any other character’s in the movie—much bigger than Dorothy’s in the
Wizard of Oz
. Observing that Twentieth Century–Fox had paid $100,000 for story rights and had consulted Maeterlinck when preparing the script, he insisted that Shirley clearly had won the starring role. He shook his head in bewilderment at their complaints: “I cannot accept your reasoning.”
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The unborn children in the Kingdom of the Future also concerned the Temples. Gertrude Temple especially disliked the idea of Mytyl and Tyltyl’s younger sibling, whose early death was foretold. (The character was retained.) George Temple objected to the boy who would be the future Abraham Lincoln because his talk of national honor and the necessity of war might provoke sectional bitterness and also encourage American intervention in the looming European conflict. To George Temple’s Republican ears, the boy sounded suspiciously like Franklin Roosevelt: “Were it not for our good isolationist Congress, we would already be at war.” Zanuck replied that he would “think it over.” A somber, long-faced older boy in the film speaks of ending slavery and injustice and predicts the people will destroy him, but he avoids the inflammatory references that troubled Shirley’s father.
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The Wizard of Oz
famously presented Dorothy Gale’s Kansas in sepia tones and then bursts into color in the Land of Oz. The contrast captured the spirit of L. Frank Baum’s original novel and also the physical and emotional gulf separating the bleak dust-bowl landscapes of the 1930s from a land without cares “somewhere over the rainbow.”

Twentieth Century–Fox’s
The Blue Bird
also opened and concluded in sepia tones. Unlike Dorothy in spare, windblown Kansas, however, Mytyl and Tyltyl live near a lush forest in a picturesque Tyrolean village around the beginning of the nineteenth century. They reside with their parents in a simple home in which the only true concern is the possibility of war with Napoleon. (The analogous specter of war with Nazi Germany would have been unmistakable for American moviegoers.) Nonetheless, Mytyl is selfish and unhappy: envious of the rich, ungenerous to an invalid girl, discontented with her lot, and disobedient and ungrateful to her pious, hardworking parents. Her misery is in sharp contrast to the spirit of virtually every previous Shirley Temple character, whose cheer and pluck invariably rise to the occasion and who repeatedly sings advice to those about her of the joys of the simple life, wherein anyone can “come and get your happiness.” Depression seems to have overtaken her, not in the economic sense, for her family enjoys ample sufficiency, but emotionally. For the first time in any Shirley Temple movie, her character has nothing to teach the adults about her, morally or spiritually, and everything to learn.

Overnight Mytyl and her little brother launch on their dream-quest for the blue bird of happiness—the thing that in previous films Shirley has possessed from the start. As they do so, like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, they leave the gray world of everyday for a marvelous Technicolor realm, filled with strange and wondrous beings, some beautiful and virtuous, others ridiculous and comic, still others treacherous and malignant. Accompanying the children on their quest are their faithful dog Tylo (metamorphosed into a man and played by Eddie Collins in a performance redolent of Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz
) and treacherous cat-turned-woman Tylette (Gale Sondergaard, who had originally been cast as the wicked witch in
Wizard of Oz
but withdrew).

The film condensed the figures and adventures of the original play but left it recognizable. It included one musical number for Shirley, “Lay-De-O,” in which she yodels a happy tune and dances with the great vaudeville comedian Al Shean. By Zanuck’s standards and those of Hollywood in general, this was a reasonably faithful adaptation. Yet what the film found more elusive was the tone of Maeterlinck’s play: at once playful and philosophic, witty and austere, humane and detached.

Zanuck did not attempt to rival
The Wizard of Oz
’s tremendous budget, which soared to more than $2,750,000, although he did invest considerable sums into the production, particularly in the lavish Palace of Luxury and the forest fire sequence. He had originally intended
The Blue Bird
to open in first-run theaters before Christmas 1939, and, like previous Shirley Temple movies extending back to
Bright Eyes
, the story ended on a Christmas scene. Instead, Twentieth Century–Fox officials decided to delay the formal premiere to January and to promote the movie in select markets, saturating them with publicity, while holding back the general release of the picture until March 1940.
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With such advance preparation, they must have hoped, comparisons with
The Wizard of Oz
would have run their course and audiences would eagerly flock to the film.

Nonetheless, critical reception, instead of propelling
The Blue Bird
’s flight, weighed it down. To be sure, some California newspapers close to the film industry cheered lustily. The
Los Angeles Times
critic Edwin Schallert called the film a “masterpiece”: “Rare imagination is conjured out of the clouds once again in ‘The Blue Bird,’ which adheres to the spirit of fantasy created in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ yet touches deeper wells of sentiment.” The movie, he asserted, was much more than merely a Shirley Temple vehicle, and he especially praised the use of color and the spectacular storm scene. “Women will be dissolved in tears over the final episode of the Kingdom of the Future with its children who are waiting to come into the world,” he predicted.
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Similarly, knowing how crucial
The Blue Bird
’s success was to Shirley Temple’s future,
Motion Picture Herald
’s William R. Weaver emerged from a preview gasping with relief: “The film is a delight to the eye, the ear and the intellect, adult or juvenile, and the manner of its making, the keen professional judgment displayed in every aspect of its composition and in the Zanuck decision to produce it just this way at just this time with just this star, is something to make you Ladies and Gentlemen of Show Business glad.”
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Other critics were disappointed, however. Howard Barnes found the film “ornately literal where it should have been magically suggestive. It has some sequences which have the irresistible illusion of a fairy tale,” he wrote, “but for the most part, it is a pretentiously dull rendition of a classic.” Barnes did not blame Shirley herself, noting that “she plays with all of the grave charm and assurance which the role demanded.” Nonetheless, he concluded, she could not rescue this “singularly maladroit transcription of a notable stage fantasy.” As for the episode in the Kingdom of the Future with the unborn children, which had so impressed Edwin Schallert, Barnes called it, “almost, but not quite, bad enough to be funny.”
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Frank Nugent, who had suffered through many a Shirley Temple vehicle, admired the forest fire episode but for the most part watched the movie “stoically and even with Spartan resignation.” No fan of the original play, which he called “complete twaddle,” he found it still “more earthbound in the manner of its screen translation.” Six months earlier, he had pronounced
The Wizard of Oz
a “delightful piece of wonder-working.” Damning
The Blue Bird
with the faintest praise, he concluded, “It is edifyingly moral and moralistic and not too frightening.”
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Small-town independent movie exhibitors generally echoed the verdicts of big-city critics. Although some expressed their appreciation for
Blue Bird
’s splendid scenes, sorrowfully, they reported how Shirley had lost many of her fans, adults especially. From Dewey, Oklahoma, the Paramount Theatre wrote, “This little fairy tale is okay for the kiddies, but the adults won’t go for it in a small town. Shirley is about through.” A spokesman for the Uptown Theatre in Pueblo, Colorado, mordantly agreed: “A beautiful fairy tale that kept the adults away in droves.” Floyd Jacobs of the New Theatre in Sardinia, Ohio, crisply summarized his experience: “It was beautiful, [but] no story, and no rural patronage. They walked out on it.” Most damning of all, John Stafford wrote from the Royal Theatre in Leonardville, Kansas, “Many came thinking it was Shirley’s last picture and went away hoping that it was.”
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Even while making
The Blue Bird
, on October 19, 1939, in his characteristic manner Zanuck excitedly dictated an idea for another Shirley Temple film. The problem nagging him had been Shirley’s emerging adolescence and with it, he feared, the end of her career as a child star. He had done everything possible to disguise that transformation, giving her short dresses and tall costars, but at the rate she was growing, he might well have thought, the rest of the company would soon have to walk on stilts. Suddenly, he saw how to turn the problem into the ultimate Shirley Temple picture: instead of concealing her growing body and stuffing her into little girl’s clothes, he could dramatize her transformation from tot to incipient teenager. “Last night I looked at the musical numbers that Shirley Temple did in her old pictures made three, four, five and five and a half years ago,” he reported. “In viewing these pictures, I realized that Shirley has almost tripled in size since her first pictures and it would be sensational if we could see her actually grow up in front of an audience from a little kid who could hardly walk, to the young lady she is at the present time. If we could get a story of this kind, we would have a sure-fire hit for her.”
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“Story, story, story” had always been Zanuck’s credo. Now he enthusiastically spun out his idea for a new one, in all likelihood smoking a cigar and pacing his office as he did so. The movie would open on a husband-and-wife vaudeville act, so as to establish “that the little girl, who is to become Shirley Temple, is reared in backstage dressing-rooms of cheap vaudeville houses.” Then, “when the child is about three and a half years old, or the age that Shirley was at the time she made her [screen] debut,” she joins the act and improves it. Zanuck imagined incorporating film footage of Shirley’s early numbers, showing her gradually growing older until the family stood at the summit of vaudeville success, the Palace Theatre in New York. They retire and settle down on a farm, but soon weary of farm life and return to the theater, only to discover that vaudeville has been eclipsed by radio and movies. “This gives us the marvelous situation of a girl who has been a star in the theatre finding herself, at ten, in a position of having to practically start all over again and beg for opportunities,” Zanuck declared. “At the end, of course, she will make a sensational come-back in some way—on the radio, in a musical show, or in the movies.” His temporary title was
The Comeback
or
The Girl Who Came Back
.
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Zanuck’s story idea, of course, steered Shirley away from the self-consciously allegorical
Blue Bird
and back to the familiar adventures of a little trouper who loved nothing more than to sing and dance, smile and cheer. He did not say that she would also be an orphan who is adopted by the hoofing couple—probably because he took that for granted. As he and writers Edwin Blum and Don Ettlinger developed the screenplay, it fleshed out Zanuck’s initial idea in a story of how an adopted baby named Wendy joins a hoofing couple to become the Three Ballantines. The film did indeed incorporate early footage of Shirley Temple performing a hula dance (using footage cut from
Captain January
) as well as her breakthrough number, “Baby Take a Bow” from
Stand Up and Cheer!

Once the Ballantine family retires to a New England farm, they are met with scorn and suspicion by much of the local population, led by the town matriarch. As Democrats and innovators among rock-ribbed Republicans, defenders of youthful ambition against repressive killjoys, the Ballantines find themselves stymied at every turn. Climaxing a series of rebuffs, the jazzy, mildly impudent vaudeville show that they organize for Wendy’s schoolmates turns into a fiasco in which disapproving parents drag off their charges. As the Ballantines sadly prepare to move away, a hurricane roars through the community, and Wendy’s father heroically rescues a group of children. Afterward, the townspeople have a dramatic change of heart. They now cherish the Ballantines and their dynamic spirit and embrace them as first citizens of the community.

The story contained many of the stock contrasts of Shirley Temple films: between good-hearted show people and their pretentious detractors, progressive visionaries and hidebound conservatives, young lovers (encouraged by Shirley) and an old spinster aunt. Above all, it allowed Shirley to return to song-and-dance numbers with a popular flavor, but no longer obliged to wear short dresses.