Heidi

Another of the family-friendly movies TCM ran on Thanksgiving was Heidi. Not having blogged about it here before, I DVRed it so I could watch it and have it fresh in my mind as I did a review.

Shirley Temple plays Heidi, a little girl whose parents have died and is being sent to live with her grandfather Adolf (Jean Hersholt) in a village in the Alps that's so stereotypical it's even called Dörfli (which would be dialectical German for a little village). Adolf is a bitter old man who wants little more than to be a hermit, and certainly doesn't want to be taking care of a little girl. Except, of course, that the little girl is played by Shirley Temple, so as the two get to know each other, she slowly begins to melt his heart.

But just as Grandpa is finally warming up to Heidi, her nasty aunt Dete (Mady Christians), who had previous foisted Heidi off on Adolf, has found a way to exploit Heidi for money! Apparently there's a family in Frankfurt who have a wheelchair-bound daughter Klara (Marcia Mae Jones), and Klara needs a companion. So Dete takes Heidi from Grandpa and brings her to Frankfurt to be what is really an indentured servant, not that Heidi knows. And not that she's happy, either, since she's grown to love Grandpa.

Heidi's right to be unhappy, since life withe the family in Frankfurt, the Sesemanns, is no bed of roses. Klara, to be fair, is a nice girl in unfortunate circumstances. Her father (Sidney Blackmer) is away on business most of the time, so he has no idea what's going on in the house. Instead, it's the evil Fräulein Rottenmeier (Mary Nash) who runs the place, keeping Klara in her wheelchair and making life miserable for poor Heidi.

But Heidi throws herself into her new job with gusto, especially since none of this is Klara's fault. Heidi, being as perfect and sinless as any other Shirley Temple character, oozes so much charm that she decides Klara is just going to get up and walk through sheer force of will. (I suppose if Klara had been an amputee Heidi would be expecting her to grow her legs back through sheer force of will too.) And Klara does take some tentative steps, which really pisses Rottenmeier off.

Meinwhile, Grandpa has decided he's going to walk all the way from Dörfli to Frankfurt to take back Heidi, even though it's several hundred miles away. And he shows up in the big city on busy Christmas Eve, nearly in time to find Heidi before she's brought back home for a family Christmas. Rottenmeier, however, has other plans for Heidi....

I didn't dislike Heidi but oh boy is this a Shirley Temple movie. It's the sort of thing that would have made a lot of audience members happy during the Depression when simplistic, happy-ending stories could bring joy to moviegoers' difficult lives. Shirley ramps up the treacle, while Nash turns up the comic book villainy past 11. There's one big musical number that I didn't care for, but other than that it's pretty much a straight story, albeit one tailored for Temple and what her audiences wanted.

There are multiple DVD releases of this one, although only one of them seems to be available at the TCM Shop. I'm not certain how many of the out-of-print ones at Amazon are colorized. (And, of course, there are other movie versions of the story.)