Little Miss Broadway isn’t one of Shirley Temple’s best movies. She had already made most of her classic films, and she’s beginning to grow out of her preternatural kawaii cuteness. Those earlier films are full of invention and energy, and she seems uncannily natural no matter what she’s required to do. The story of Little Miss Broadway is also artificial, using her more as a Shirley Temple formula than as an actress. Her dancing and singing, too, are not quite up to the earlier films’ standards — none of her films without Bill Robinson are. But I like it, more than I probably should.
I don’t usually invite colorized films to this blog, but this one is an exception. Originally made in b&w, Little Miss Broadway was one of the first films subjected to the Legend colorizing process, one of the early ones. Most of the time I’m a snob about it. I wouldn’t dream of allowing my eyes to see a colorized showing of The Maltese Falcon. But whatever they did to this print, it’s like watching a movie on ‘shrooms. It improves the film visually for me — the choices of pastel-like saturation and hue give the film a slightly psychedelic, Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy quality that’s both warm and dazzling. I’m especially enamored of the respect given to the color gray. I can’t recall another film in which gray becomes a dominant joy-color. Check it out in the scene with George Murphy, before they do the famous “We Should Be Together” duet.
Fwiw, I like Murphy’s dancing. Like Robinson, he seems to really enjoy dancing with a child partner. The choreography of the duets is gracefully simple, which attunes them to Shirley’s capabilities, but also involves lots of gliding, lifting, and leaping onto elevated surfaces, which is distinctive of Murphy’s style. (Astaire did those things well too, of course, but Murphy’s simpler, more erect style makes them seem even more effortless.)
The creepiness that many folks feel about Shirley being treated as a child-woman-partner is present but I haven’t seen much discussion about what I think is the main perspective of her films — they’re “grampy” films, modeling the affection of grandparents, especially grandpappies, for their young grand-daughters. As in most of her films, Shirley plays a functional orphan, a literal one here, a magical child who enters the story without dominating family structures and elicits the affection first of older men and women before she is adopted by a couple that she has, in effect, brought together by filling the holes in their lives.
Little Miss Broadway is definitely not a grandma film — the villain is Murphy’s “Aunt Sarah,” played wonderfully by Edna May Oliver. Here, too, I think the colorization supplies an extra dimension to the comedy by adding some wonder. Aunt Sarah enters the “Variety Hotel” — which she is striving to shut down, heavy mother that she is — and is exposed to its wonders.
More grampies. Check out the vibe of the elder actors singing the Spina-Bullock song “Swing Me an Old-Fashioned Song” at the final trial.
(Btw, I’m getting interested in Spina-Bullock tunes. They emulate Cole Porter, and that’s not a bad thing.) The film ends with a justly famous routine, with Murphy and Shirley singing and dancing to the film’s title tune. It’s a child’s version of a Busby Berkeley finale — and it fits right in with the Hollywood comic tradition of turning a trial into a joyous spectacle. Little Miss Broadway is a gentle trip, appropriate for grampies and grannies on ‘shrooms.
