Little Miss Marker was Shirley Temple’s breakthrough film. She was five years old when she made it. Watching her in it is an unnerving experience in more ways than one. The whole film is a weird experience. Directed by Alexander Hall, some of it is so bad, so poorly paced and edited, and so old fashioned in style, that it becomes almost dreamlike; some it is as brilliantly funny as any film of the period. Based on a popular story by Damon Runyon that has now been filmed in four versions over the decades, the script is a terrific adaptation (by otherwise unheralded Paramount contract writers William Lippman, Sam Hellman, and Gladys Lehman) — on paper. Runyon’s story is barely a sketch, so a great deal of new business is added and none of it violates the spirit of the original. The real star is Adolphe Menjou, as the gruff bookie Sorrowful Jones who takes on a girl child as security for an I.O.U. — the “marker” of the title — for a racing bet by a father, who later commits suicide when he loses it. Menjou was a master of these streetwise movers — and here he’s very much on the same turf as the prizefight manager Gabby Sloan in The Milky Way and the shyster Billy Flynn in Roxie Hart. Shirley, for her part, is not yet the preternaturally smooth and polished actor-entertainer she will become in just a few months, but she is uncannily confident and just generally uncanny. When she’s on screen, she seems to have come from another world altogether.
It’s not Shirley’s hyper-precocious screen presence that makes the film so weird, though. The film could never be made this way in our time. It is thoroughly perverse in many ways — some by our standards, some by its own time’s. The film was released just weeks before the Hays Code’s enforcement mechanism, the Production Code Administration, was established. But it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been examined by the censors. Although almost all the characters are more or less shady — they’re literally Runyonesque, after all — it must have looked heartwarmingly family friendly and go-go positive (far more than the original story). But to more recent eyes its eroticization of a five-year old girl and the independence it gives her would undoubtedly disturb not only helicopter parents and those anxious about rampant pedophilia, but many non-puritans as well. I prefer not to moralize. I’m not scandalized by Little Miss Marker, but it does throw me for some loops. It may not be a comic masterpiece but it’s an important film that shows attitudes about children that are foreign to contemporary mores, and this alone should be thought through. And not just about children and eroticism but also race. For reasons that are still mysterious to me, the child-star Shirley Temple was the one Hollywood star who seemed to come from a planet that was innocent of racism.
The story is pretty steep in any case. A motherless child is offered by a desperate but otherwise well-dressed and well-spoken gambler father as a “marker” for a bet; and the marker is accepted by Sorrowful, even though he knows that the heavily favored horse will lose because its owner, Big Steve (Charles Coburn), has decided not to dope it for once. The child (Shirley Temple) meanwhile is so chipper and confident, so beautiful, and so willing to go along with the deal, that she seems more like a fairy than a real girl. And like a fairy, it’s not clear that the cherub isn’t just a bit too amoral and manipulative to be a little angel.
Some film historians have argued that Shirley’s great attraction was not so much prurient as admiring. Even if, as Graham Greene believed, her appeal was primarily for elder males with perverted grandfather complexes, it was arguably her pluck, her sense of self-worth, that moved them. She became the iconic image of a strong, confident future, a replacement-generation not injured by the horrors of the War, the excesses of the Twenties, and the miseries of the Depression. Even at five years of age, the child-woman looked the toughest of men right in the eye.
The historical noise machine says that Menjou did not warm to Shirley, that he was unnerved by her precocious professionalism and command even at that early age. (It’s also said that she asked director Hall if Menjou could be replaced after he flubbed some lines. That’s maybe more chutzpah than anyone would be comfortable with from a five year old.) In the film, she escapes adult control repeatedly and absorbs the cynicism of her minders; worse, she seems convinced of her invulnerability. Her innocence is almost on the verge of being weaponized. The bookie joint’s young Black janitor, Dizzy Memphis (Willie Best), notices that she is still sitting in the office long after the race has been run:
DIZZY: I done thought your pappy come got you. MARKY: Maybe he forgot me. DIZZY: Does he go around forgettin' you? MARKY: He forgot me once at the circus, and they arrested the man that found me.
The script makes clear that none of the hard-boiled men in the film’s lumpen racing world have any prurient interests in the child. The problem is with the way she is displayed to the audience — and the feeling that she seems to be choosing to display herself that way. Sorrowful would like to ignore her as much as possible, but she makes it hard for him. (Menjou is great at playing a curmudgeon who gradually grows a heart.)
In one scene, the crew of inveterate gamblers pool their bets on Marky’s weight — an episode not in Runyon’s tale, and to all appearances just an excuse for grown men to get their hands on the little girl, basically treating her as a package of horseflesh. Notably, Sorrowful resists until the bet insists.
Sorrowful decides to take Marky to his own apartment for the night; if the father doesn’t appear, he’ll hand her over to the police. As she gets ready for bed, Marky insists that she needs to be buttoned into her nightshirt and provides the evidence. And for good measure, displays her backside like a can-can floozy.
Sorrowful makes no comment and resigns himself to preparing the child for bed — a bed she gleefully commandeers for herself, leaving Sorrowful to sleep on some extremely uncomfortable looking chairs. Now, I don’t know what the attitudes were about children’s eroticism specifically in the US of the 1920s and early 30s. Much has been alleged about the Victorians’ pedo-prurience in the past few decades. But it’s also a fact that family albums all over the world include photos of bare naked infants on rugs and beaches and unclothed young children cavorting and having untrammeled fun. I don’t doubt that many parents and relations had some fun joking about the children’s erogenous equipment but it’s also a cold fact that even the most innocent of those photos cannot be shared on social media platforms at this moment in our culture. In the world of Little Miss Marker, everybody acts correctly and the presence of of Sorrowful’s love-interest, Bangles Carson (well-played by Dorothy Dell, a promising Alice Faye-like young actor who died in a car crash soon after the film was made), gives Marky a nurturing mother-figure that Runyon’s story did not. So the problem is not diegetic; it’s how Shirley seems to display her body and willpower as if it were her own decision, knowing all that it might imply. It’s a good bet that (pace Freud) a five year did not improvise these moves; she’s following directions. It’s those directions that are disorienting.
Unlike her later films that were geared to conservative midwestern audiences, Little Miss Marker is gritty and streetwise. It was clearly intended to match Capra’s Lady for a Day, which came out the previous year and was also based on a Runyon story. It, too, is a story about a crew of hard street operators led by a tough guy who band together to save and nurture an outcast — in Lady for a Day, the old cranky street-vendor-beggar, Apple Annie. Capra’s film is one of the masterpieces of the period. The script of Little Miss Marker wants to show that Marky is a real-enough girl to be in danger of becoming a tough little moll, which Runyon’s story does not, but which comports better with the formula established by Lady for a Day.
Shirley sings a duet for only one song, and doesn’t dance (an odd omission, since that’s all she does in Runyon’s story). The disposition of the music is altogether odd, since the music is excellent, with two fine Rainger-Robin songs sung by Dell, who was an excellent singer in the Sophie Tucker-Alice Faye mode. It’s a pity — as always — that Universal won’t allow clips, preventing folks from seeing her nice performances. Fortunately, I can post recordings from the soundtrack below.
There’s another thing that I find fascinating about many of Shirley Temple’s films, including this one. She appears to be allowed to establish completely unprejudiced, affectionate relationships with non-white characters that the adult characters generally treat as servants. Her friendship with Bill Robinson is of course legendary. It’s not enough to say that her innocence gives her license, since in so many ways her precocity makes her a surrogate adult. In Marker, too, there are a couple of early scenes that stand out. In one, Marky is handed off, as it were, from the owner of the upstairs Chop Suey joint who has been babysitting and feeding her, to Dizzy Memphis, and the vibe among them is smooth and natural.
One might speculate that in that world Asian, African-American, and child count the same — but nope, since Marky is in most ways the as yet uncorrupted ideal white child. It’s hard to imagine that she would grow up to be a racist — unless, maybe, she adopts the (presumed) racism of her thuggish white babysitters. And saving her from that low class cynicism is what the story is all about. (The ambiguities are there in Runyon’s story, too, in a different way — there are lots of racist and ethnic slurs thrown about as if they were normal and natural, but Sorrowful’s crew appears to be ethnically and racially diverse.) One might argue that Marky enjoys such protection precisely because she represents whiteness as innocence. That might be a solid interpretation of the The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel of the following year. The problem for interpreters, though, it seems to me, is that there is a disconnect between the profound racism of the films’ stories and production, and what appears to be a wholly non-racist enthusiasm and joy of the child actor working with non-white adults. The racism, like the eroticization, was delivered by the adults in scenarios that the child had no way to make judgments about.
I feel the film underscores that attitude in Dell’s performance of her Rainger-Robin songs, which are both blues tunes that delight Marky. It’s a pity that Shirley did not sing duets with great Black singers as she danced with Robinson.
So: a fine script, good acting, good music, terrible directing, ambiguous/ambivalent values. Little Miss Marker needs to be thought about.
Bonus: the songs.
Marky likes:
