Well, there’s another childhood icon gone—Shirley
Temple Black died Monday night, aged 85.
I experienced Shirley Temple strictly through television. Her movies
must have been really cheap for local TV stations to broadcast, because they
seemed to run them right much when I was growing up. She had to be one of the
first stars to be merchandised; and Shirley Temple dolls are still manufactured
today.
Later, while studying history, I came to understand how
she could be such a phenomenon, because people in the thirties really wanted to
escape from reality, and her movies delivered the biggest doses of sweetness
and light you could get for the price of admission. They never seemed that
remarkable to me as a child, but I can see why folks would line up and pay
their $.15 to watch her overcome all manner of problems with a few songs and a
dance.
Black’s movie career didn’t go beyond childhood, but she
went on to marry (badly the first time round; for life the second), raise a
family and build a creditable public service career under the Ford
administration.
The quintessential Shirley Temple moment for me is her
dance with Bill Robinson up and down the plantation house staircase in The Little Colonel. I don’t remember one
damned thing about the plot or anyone else in the film, but that sequence is
just terrific. So here it is:
No comments:
Post a Comment