Curly Top

FXM has a couple of Shirley Temple movies in their current rotation that, at the time they were put in, I hadn't seen. So I recorded some of them, including Curly Top, which I finally got around to watching.

Shirley plays Elizabeth Blair, who at the start of the movie is one of a whole bunch of girls at a private charity orphanage looked after by matrons Higgins (Rafaela Ottiano) and Denham (Jane Darwell). It's not mentioned where the money came from to get it, but Elizabeth has a pet pony that she brings in to the main building late one night! She is, it turns out, a rather mischievous little girl, although as is usually the case with Shirley Temple movies, she'll also melt your heart.

Elizabeth's hijinks get her in trouble when the trustees come for a visit. Wyckoff (Etienne Girardot) is the closest thing to a bad guy the movie has, the mean old trustee who doesn't want to spend money on anything since spartan living was fine for him in the old days. Fortunately for her, there's a much younger and nicer trustee in the form of Edward Morgan (John Boles), a Park Avenue lawyer worth millions. He offers to adopt Elizabeth, although because of some bizarre notion that Elizabeth can't accept kindness without being beholden to people, he plans to do it in the name of a nonexistent friend, and just look after Elizabeth until the friend gets back from Europe.

Complicating things is the fact that Elizabeth has an older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson). She, like Edward, is an amateur musician, writing songs for Elizabeth to sing. And when their parents died, Mary was still young enough to be in the orphanage, and made a promise to the parents that Mary would never let herself and Elizabeth be split up. So if Elizabeth gets adopted, Mary has to go, too.

Of course, Edward finds himself falling in love with Mary even though in real life John Boles was 20 years older than Rochelle Hudson. A pilot Jimmie (Maurice Murphy) also falls in love with Mary at Morgan's Long Island summer house, and that makes for the one other conflict in the movie. Jimmie isn't a bad guy by any means; it's just that Mary doesn't really love him.

Curly Top is a movie that has a fairly threadbare plot, filled out by a whole bunch of songs. Shirley is charming here, but because of the lack of real dramatic tension the movie winds up being little more than a pleasant diversion. It's not bad, and to be fair there are some good points, perhaps most notably in a scene where Temple's Elizabeth parodies Mr. Wyckoff. Seeing Shirley do "old man" is a hoot. Darwell is good although she, like everybody else from the orphanage disappears from the movie once Shirley is adopted. Also providing good flavor is Arthur Treacher as yet another butler.

Curly Top is available on DVD both as a standalone, and as part of at least one box set.