From what I’ve read, Shirley Temple’s Depression-era movies helped a lot people deal with the hard times they were facing. Over the years, I’ve tried to watch them and find myself desparately looking for an insulin shot. The characters she played were so far over the top it made me ill. I realize that movies have changed dramatically sine the early 30’s, but I wonder if there some people who felt the same way at the time?
I certain there were some: there are people who like or dislike any movie when it comes out, often for reasons similar to why we don’t like them.
In the case of Temple, the general public in her day thought her to be cute, not cloying.
Even that cat dances better than I do!
It was a strange time in the movie industry. The Production Code and Hays Office had started toning down the movies in 1933 after the industry had started feeding red meat to the public in 1931-32 with ever more racy and violent content. Nothing terribly risqué by today’s standards of course – someone said “hell” now and then, gals showed some leg, and there was a LOT of drinking and gunplay. Plus a good bit of social commentary.
It all was enough to prompt Catholic dioceses to encourage parishioners to boycott theaters. Facing a huge potential loss of ticket sales in cities like Boston and Chicago, the industry adopted the self-censoring Hays Office and and Production Code. And yes, a certain trend toward sweetness and light and away from “message pictures” took hold. That’s where Shirley comes in.
Mae West’s dialogue still cracks me up, though.
“Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
Nowadays, many TV and movie directors will be terrified of risking that their female character might be seen as “slutty” or “unlikable”. Pity, really.
I would think that most people back then would have rolled their eyes at Shirley’s eternal sunshiney outlook. Did she ever not get her way in her movies?
[ol][li]The chief driving force of the Hays code was misogyny, not “decency.” The raciest and most violent pictures were just the ones that got the noisiest press. The pictures most affected by the Hays Code were the “women’s pictures,” like the early movies of Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Kay Francis, and Ruth Chatterton, in which they portrayed business executives, career women, doctors, or happy single mothers. After the Hays Code came into effect, there were no fewer “bad girls” in movies; in fact there were more: the Hays Code mandated that women who were previously portrayed as strong and independent now must be punished for their independence; that independence now be portrayed as just as “bad” as promiscuity. The Hays Code didn’t remove the racy images from the screen; it just mandated a code of punitive portrayals of such images. Girls could still be sluts, or single mothers, they just had to die in the end. A woman could have a career, she just had to give it up for her husband by the time the credits rolled. At any rate, adult pictures didn’t become any scarcer; they just had judgmental endings tacked on. So I don’t really think Shirley Temple stepped in to fill any particular gap. This is probably just a matter of opinion though; I’m not sure how you’d “prove” a cause and effect either way.[/li][li]Shirley Temple was the #1 box office draw for, IIRC, four solid years in the Thirties. Bigger than Clark Gable. If you watch a bunch of her movies at first–especially the early (pre-code!) ones–she was just preternaturally cute. She was also extremely talented: she worked frequently with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tapdancers of all time. Although it’s clear when you watch their routines that, to a certain extent, Robinson is “dancing down” to her, it’s not by much. While watching her movies, I was struck several times at how animated her face was, for ever line of dialog, and every line of a song. Her eyes, her mouth, her expression—her hands—everything. She was 100% performer, with every ounce of her being. And though by today’s standards this comes off as exaggerated and unnatural, in the stagey style of early movies it seems perfectly natural. She certainly doesn’t stick out among her castmates as being any more stylized than the rest of them. [/li][li]Still, she didn’t “age” well: very little of her uncanny screen presence is evident in 1939’s The Little Princess, made when Temple was 11. And less still for 1940’s The Bluebird. Her adolescent roles aren’t bad though. She’s reasonably convincing as mother AND daughter in 1942’s Annie Rooney; she holds her own with Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones in 1944’s Since You Went Away; and she practically steals The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer from Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in 1947.[/li][li]Nonetheless—and this may be the best answer to the OP—Graham Greene had an entirely different theory about Shirley Temple’s appeal. He lost a libel suit for a review of John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkle in which he referred to Temple’s “dimpled depravity,” and wrote that “infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult.” (here.)[/li][/ol]
[QUOTE=lissener]
[list=1][li]The chief driving force of the Hays code was misogyny, not “decency.” The raciest and most violent pictures were just the ones that got the noisiest press. The pictures most affected by the Hays Code were the “women’s pictures,” like the early movies of Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Kay Francis, and Ruth Chatterton, in which they portrayed business executives, career women, doctors, or happy single mothers. After the Hays Code came into effect, there were no fewer “bad girls” in movies; in fact there were more: the Hays Code mandated that women who were previously portrayed as strong and independent now must be punished for their independence; that independence now be portrayed as just as “bad” as promiscuity.[/li][/QUOTE]
Fascinating. I’ve never run across that thesis. Any weblinks you can point me to that discuss it?
Most importantly, what was the impetus for the pressure against independent females? Was it specifically Catholic? Was it a smoky backroom gentlemen’s agreement? Or was it a cultural consensus not to undermine men’s role as breadwinners any more than the depression had already done?
(I’ve seen very few of the “woman’s pix,” but Irene Dunne’s Anne Vickers (1933) strikes me as very unconservatively “modern” in its portrayal of a prison warden turned single mom. That kind of thing might even draw glares from a few cultural conservatives nowadays.)
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Pretty good book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312284314/002-3850386-1917607?v=glance&n=283155
Even better book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226318850/qid=1137462170/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-3850386-1917607?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
The Hays Code was almost entirely the Catholic Church. Joseph Breen, the code Enforcer (Hays was a figurehead who rarely traveled to Hollywood from NY) worked very closely with Catholic bishops in creating and promulgating the Code. Keep in mind, the Code was entirely voluntary. Breen talked the studios into adopting it in the first place, to placate local censors. The logic was to censor the films at home, so they wouldn’t be randomly chopped up by small-town censors. The history of movies might be very different if the studio heads had decided to challenge the local censors on First Amendment grounds, rather than acquiese to Breen’s Catholic agenda and appease them by self-censoring.
Yes, one of the great ones.
Also interesting to note that prior to the Hays Code, the biggest stars in Hollywood were women; the biggest movies had women protagonists. Since the Hays Code, that has never been the case again.