Shirley Temple: America's Sweetheart Collection, Vol. 1 (Heidi / Curly Top / Little Miss Broadway)

SPOILER ALERT! THIS REVIEW MAY INCLUDE SPOILERS!Curly Top (1935) They'd have to censor out her face as they did her appearance as a gilded Cupid, to avoid all risk of folks finding her adorable. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Grundy, wherever you may be! This little star is a god to those who grew up during her three Number-One-Boxoffice years. Six-year-old Shirley is an orphan again in this one and sings the justly famous "Animal Crackers" song as well as the cutesey "When I Grow Up" (in a year or two or three), and does an inspired tap atop a grand piano. The vignettes of her posing costumed as the subjects of famous paintings, like Blue Boy, were only just okay, while her "hula" on the beach was child-like and amateurish. In this kid's portfolio, that's a big compliment.Heidi (1937) Shirley is at her peak. This is before she got fat. She sparkles and dazzles and twinkles and dimples all through it. She was such a little professional and so alert to potential damage to her career, that she fought long and hard with Darryl F. Zanuck about the Netherland's "Little Wooden Shoes" number in a Swiss Alps movie. This film is an acting gig for her, not another song-and-dance trip, something she had longed for. Mama Temple worried that Marcia Mae Jones, as the crippled girl "Klara" might overshadow Shirley since she'd been in the business ten years and had 20 screen credits, but they worked well together and later were both cast in "The Little Princess." Good psychology in the script: Independent and self-sufficient Heidi, in efforts to win over the grouchy old Grandpa, continually asks him for uneeded assistance. No adversity is so terrible that it erases her smile for very many frames. Hard not to get a lump in your throat no matter how many times you've seen it and no matter how many versions there are, when "Klara" takes her first steps. Hard not to want a halo over Heidi's curlicued head!Little Miss Broadway (1938) Must have been a real hair-puller whether to let Shirley's hem-lines down to hide her chubby, waffled thighs or keep them way up there to make her look younger. Anyway, that face and that talent mean that the baby-fat on her does not matter much. In her biography, she mentions more than once the studios keeping her skirts short, but writes of dieting only very casually, so I don't think this was a traumatic issue for her. Mrs. Temple was very protective but I have the feeling that she continually pushed and pushed and pushed, in her own sweet way. She probably told studio heads that she'd tolerate no comments on the kid's expanding girth. Everybody's little star, however, is very convincing in this role. And a buncha really talended "orphans" had names and lines and sang harmonious backup, but got no role-credits, thanks to Mom's protective instincts against any talented tot challenging darling daughter's box-office monopoly. Playing Lil' Orphan Shirley once again, she lives in a show-biz boarding hotel whose principle owner demands its demolition to make way for expensive new apartments. The minority stockholder in the form of the romantic male lead asks for an injunction against this and it's up to Shirley to convince hizzoner to look at the talent residing therein before deciding whether to tear down the venerable Variety Hotel. So a full-fledged Broadway musical transpires right in the courtroom and the sour-faced old judge, tapping his foot and bouncing about on the bench, rules in favor of Shirley and them. Off she goes into the sunset with her wanna-be adoptive parents who rescued her from the orphanage and who vow to get married one of these days. Side-show midget siblings George and Olive Brasno played Variety Hotel residents too and apparently were much smaller than Shirley, even at that age.

I love Shirley Temple movies, and had VHS tapes of a few. But when the tapes started degrading, I went in search of DVD editions. I prefer the original black & white, and when Fox released a few DVDs a couple years ago (with both colour and black & white), I bought "Heidi". The black & white quality was awful! In fact, it looked like they'd just used the badly colourized version and removed the colour. I was very disappointed.So when I heard that these movies were being rereleased, I eagerly (but a little warily) ordered them. The quality on these is amazing! The black & white versions have been restored very well (which you can clearly see when you compare them with the included old black & white trailers for other Shirley Temple films). Even the colourized versions are quite acceptable. Whereas in the olden days (the 1980s) the colourizing process often left inexact coloured halos around people and objects, this new process is very precise. I noticed individual hairs that were coloured, without any of that nasty halo. The whites of people's eyes are actually white, too, not flesh-toned."Little Miss Broadway" is one of my favourites, and I was thrilled with the quality of the film. The older colourized versions were too bright (as if someone had turned up the brightness and contrast on them), almost obscuring facial features in places. This new release is very much how I imagine the original must have been. Clear, a little grainy, and perfectly charming.I don't care much about the trailers, but what I would like to have seen (especially for this set) was the deleted scene from "Little Miss Broadway". I believe it is available on a compilation DVD somewhere, but it would have been nice to see it included in the actual movie it was taken from.I've already ordered the second 3-disc set for my collection. These movies are great!

I received my set today(Sept 13) from Amazon. Originally rescheduled from May, I love the packaging and the colorized versions look good. Some Fox colorized versions have been bad and the original set a couple if years ago had an atrocious colorized Bright Eyes. The recent Australian releasee of this title in PAL is colorized only(no b&w versions)even worse. Many have been issued in Australia in prices varying from A$8.62 to A$18.99. What is a disappointment is that I was under the impression that The Shirley Temple Storybook series was to start appearing in this new series and although two of the 3 titles have, in Special Features, the line The Shirley Temple Theatre there is no episodes from this series which I saw on Sunday evenings when they were new. What happened to those extras. The Little Miss Broadway trailer is has not titles or cast dialogue but the music track has been included. I asume(it is noted that this the case on the menu)that the footage has been lost but then it could have been ccarefully(the dialogue that is) from the original film tracks. Heidi was originally issued in Septiatone that was popular then and the NTSC laserdisc edition did preserve this version but there is a rare freeze frame at the start of the laserdisc)the scene where Shirley is being taken to see her granddad.The Animal Crackers song in Curly Top has a noticeable splice that is in all versions I have seen including TV, Video, etc and also and records and cds from the original films of Shirley's films. Zanuck, for some reason, did not like his stars making commercial records and thus some Fox items appear on records as soundtracks in recent years reissues.

Par

:)