Poor Little Rich Girl (1936)

FXM took the Shirley Temple movie Poor Little Rich Girl out of the vaults recently. It was on this morning, and is going to be on again tomorrow morning at 7:55 AM, so I watched it to do a full-length post here.

Temple plays the title character, a young girl named Barbara Barry who is the daughter of widowed soap magnate Richard (Michael Whalen). She lives in the lap of luxury, except that she finds it extremely constraining -- she just wants to be a little girl and play and do other little girl things. Instead, she's got a bunch of servants who play a game of operator the minute she sneezes that results in people thinking she's seriously ill. Dad eventually decides that it wouldn't be so bad to send her off to boarding school, where she can be with other people her age.

As for Dad, he's in a business rivalry with another soap manufacturer, Simon Peck (Claude Gillingwater), with each of them thinking the other should be bought out. Complicating things is that Richard meets Peck's ad executive Margaret (Gloria Stuart) and falls in love with her until she realizes who he is. Another complicating factor is that the Barry soap company sponsors a popular radio show while Peck refuses, thinking the idea is old fashioned.

Back to poor little Barbara. At the train station, her nurse loses her purse and when she goes out to fetch it, she gets hit by a car, leaving poor Barbara alone. She walks out the station and follows an organ grinder, since one of her favorite children's stories involved an organ grinder. That man lives in the same apartment building as the Dolans (Alice Faye and Jack Haley), a pair of struggling vaudevillean dancers. Mr. Dolan practices his tap dancing steps, and little Barbara downstairs is just so damn good that's she's able to repeat the steps she heard from the floor above her. Mr. Dolan realizes he's got a hit on his hands, but Mrs. Dolan is worried about the legal problems of bringing this girl on as the third Dolan.

This being a Shirley Temple movie, it's not too hard to figure out where this is all going to go. The act of "Dolan, Dolan, and Dolan" is going to wow the producers enough that they try to pitch it to Peck. Little Barbara is so darn charming that she's going to melt Peck's heart, and he'll put the Dolans on his new radio show, making them a huge success. And then Dad is going to realize that his daughter is not at school, but a star on a radio show. (You'd think the school would have called the day Barbara didn't show up, and that the date would have been fixed before Barbara and her nurse got to the train station.) Oh, and the Dolans are going to have to worry about their potential legal problems, but those will all go away.

I think I've said with pretty much every 1930s Shirley Temple movie I've blogged about that it's so easy to see why she was such a big hit with Depression-era audiences. Poor Little Rich Girl is, on the face of it, nothing more than a formulaic movie of a seeming orphan charming everybody. But Shirley Temple is so charming that she makes the material work. It doesn't hurt when Fox paired her with good dancers like she has here. Michael Whalen is the weak part of the movie, but he's not around much so it doesn't matter.

All in all, Poor Little Rich Girl is another solid Shirley Temple entry that will probably please anybody in need of a good pick-me-up. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings. (Well, it is on Amazon streaming if you can go that route.) And in that regard there was a problem either with my DVR (which is nearly full and getting old), or with the FXM print, in that a few spots near the end were turning green and purple. (I had problems with Bachelor Flat as well; it could just be a certain portion of the disk that's the problem.)