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Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 5 — 5 Comments

  1. I love the scenes of Temple and Robinson in all their movies. Their dance sequences are a little bit magical.

    As for Temple and Barrymore, they are superb on screen like the two veteran actors they were.

    I haven't commented on every post, but I've sure enjoyed this series.

  2. Only 90 seconds? It probably just slipped my memory, then. The last thing I remember is the grandfather's reunion with his daughter, but then I haven't seen the movie in many years.

  3. Welcome, beachgal and Elisabeth, and thanks for your comments! Elisabeth, I have The Little Colonel on DVD (both b&w and colorized), and I suspect it's incomplete rather than edited. The Technicolor party scene is so short — less than 90 seconds — that it's hard to believe they'd go to the trouble for so little. I think there must have been more; maybe even a song.

    It seems to me a logical choice would have been to give Shirley another reprise of "Love's Young Dream", the old Thomas Moore poem set to music by Cyril Mockridge. Evelyn Venable sings it in the opening scene before her falling out with the old man, then Shirley sings it midway through the picture, which begins to thaw her grandfather's heart. A final reprise in Technicolor would have been the cherry icing on the cake. But if that was ever there it's gone now, and my guess is the footage was simply lost rather than edited out. In any case, the scene begins so abruptly, in mid-dialogue, that it's obvious something is missing.

    As for your not remembering a party scene — well, the scene is so short, and seeing it colorized, without the b&w-to-color transition to set it off, it's possible you just didn't notice that a party was going on.

  4. I had no idea about the Technicolor ending, either! I saw it in a colorized VHS. Oddly enough I don't remember a final party scene at all—did I possibly see an edited version?

  5. I didn't know for years there was any color to this film at the end – I first saw it on bad stock at the kids Sat. movies in the late 40s and those early color reals were not the copy that went out in rentals then. Ditto when my school showed it – then there were the many times on TV long before there was much of any broadcasting in color – I only saw it in color in the 80s finally as it was originally intended to be seen.