For some values of "adventure"

Another of my recent movie viewings was Adventure in Baltimore, which ran on TCM as part of a night of movies featuring suffragette characters.

To be honest, the suffrage part of the movie is minor, although the main charcter, Dinah Sheldon (Shirley Temple), is certainly a strong young woman. She's at an all-girls school circa 1905 in an art class where she declares that she's going to be a great artist; as such, she needs to learn how to draw the naked human form. Such shocking language gets her thrown out of school and sent home to her family in Baltimore.

Dinah's father is Dr. Andrew Sheldon (Robert Young), the doctor here being a doctor of divinity as he's an Episcopal priest up for the vacant bishop's position in his diocese. Dr. Sheldon is somewhat socially liberal, as he wants to discipline Dinah a lot more lightly than her mom (Josephine Hutchinson) does. This lack of discipline might just jeopardize Dr. Sheldon's chance at being named bishop, although nobody talks much about the sin of pride.

Dinah, having returned home, continues to be brash and bold and make life a mess for everybody. She's got a friend in the boy next door, Tom Wade (John Agar, Shirley's real-life husband at the time), who works for the boss in the new-fangled job of auto mechanic. In most movies set in this era, you'd expect Tom to be Dinah's boyfriend, and you can probably guess that's going to happen by the end of the movie. But Tom meets the much richer Bernice who becomes his girlfriend, and has to deal with Dinah.

First up is Dinah going to the park to paint, doing a portrait of a drunk on a park bench, and inadvertently starting a brawl among some other bums who debate whether she's got the colors right (not that we can tell, of course, since this is a black-and-white movie). Dinah and the bums all wind up in bail, and Dinah asks Tom to bail her out, saying that she's going to jump bail!

Then, Tom has to deliver a speech for some civic function, and Dinah offers to make things up by helping. Of course, her "help" is to give Tom a barely-edited speech on women's liberation that she has to know is going to embarrass Tom. But no, she goes ahead and gives him that speech. Finally, she asks Tom to model for a painting in an art contest, and her painting is to put Tom's head on a shirtless body. Tom's justifiably angry, and the rest of the community is scandalized by the painting. Dad, to try to save his nomination for bishop, finally relents to Mom to send Dinah off to an aunt until things die down....

Adventure in Baltimore is a movie that has some potential, but that I think ultimately doesn't quite live up to it. That's mostly down to the writing of Shirley Temple's character. She was 20 she made this movie and trying to transition into adult roles, something that never quite worked out for her. The script here doesn't help because she's made out to be so obnoxious that I couldn't help but dislike her. She's not so much an independent woman in the style of Betty Grable's from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim but a jerk who doesn't seem to think of others.

I also had a problem with the ending, which seemed too artificial and tacked on in order to satisfy the studio's need for a happy ending. I can't help but think the rest of the parishes in Dad's diocese would have been nowhere near as liberal as he was and that this would have caused much more serious conflict. This isn't the post-Vatican II Catholic church, after all.

If you want to see why Shirley Temple didn't make it as an adult actress, Adventure in Baltimore isn't a bad place to start.