moonspinner55 Review of The Little Colonel

The Little Colonel (1935)

The post-Civil War south...Hollywood--and Shirley Temple--style

[6/10 · 10 June 2017]

Crusty former Army colonel Lionel Barrymore is encouraged to patch things up with his estranged daughter after her marriage to a Yankee produces an adorably outspoken child who emulates her bossy grandfather. It's Shirley Temple in the Old South after the Civil War, scuttled after by housekeeper Hattie McDaniel and dancing up the staircase with butler Bill Robinson, and some will surely quibble with this Hollywood-ized version of time and place. Even though there's bad blood between relatives, everyone sparkles with sass and sentiment! The main joy here is in watching little Shirley outwit her elders, although the baptismal sequence at the river (complete with spiritual "wailing") provides an eerie shimmer that nearly seems to belong to a different film altogether. **1/2 from ****