When Captain January was released, Shirley Temple was eight years old and had already made several hit films. Her arc was still ascending, and that incredible sense of cheer and fun in her early movies is evident. It’s a sentimental story that could have been much worse. Once again Shirley is an orphan, rescued and unofficially adopted by a lighthouse keeper, the eponymous Captain January (Guy Kibbee), after her parents were drowned offshore. She is the darling of the salty seamen of the seaside village, but problems arrive with a new truant officer, a strict tightly-buttoned witch of a blocking character. There is a constant threat to remove Star (Shirley’s character) because she’s not in school. Meanwhile, Captain January’s lighthouse is about to be automated and his position terminated. He’s too old to get another job. Matters are resolved when her parents’ kinfolk are located; it turns out they are rich and live in a patrician district of Boston. Star is adopted by them and taken to Boston — but melodramatic sorrow is averted when her rich aunt and uncle give her a big boat (a real one) as a present, and have it manned by Captain January and her other favorites from her lighthouse days.
One of the highlights of the film is a famous duet between Shirley and Buddy Ebsen, one of the best comic dancers in Hollywood. (I grew up knowing Ebsen only from the Davy Crockett Disney TV series. I was stunned when I first saw him dance in a movie, not too many years ago.) “At the Codfish Ball” is another example of how much fun some Hollywood dancers had dancing with children. (George Murphy was another.) Not to mention Shirley’s fun.
Graham Greene made his famous observations about Shirley Temple’s prurient appeal in a review of this film. He went to town: “[h]er admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.” He got in trouble for it, too — the studio and Temple’s parents sued Greene and his paper, and won a settlement. Greene was right, surely, and audiences today have even more trouble dealing with this precocious child, who later became the ruler of a doll empire and the model for child beauty contestants. (Not to mention US Ambassador to the UN.) The film-makers weren’t unaware, of course. There’s a hilarious scene in Captain January in which Star gets dressed up in a child’s version of a costume that she’s seen her dead mother, an opera singer, wear in an old performance advertisement for Lucia di Lamermoor. Which leads to a silly parody of the sextet from that opera with the old captain (played very well by Kibbee) and his best friend, Captain Nazro (played by Slim Summerville). I suspect this is also a parody of the opera/operetta style comedies of Jeanette MacDonald and Deanna Durbin (who was just starting out) that MGM and Universal were banking on.
The original script ended with a risky tear-jerker, the death of the Captain. The risk was allayed with a new ending, in which all the abandoned favorites are restored by the rich Boston providers of happy endings specially tailored for orphans.
