The Little Princess (1939)

The Little Princess
Directed by Walter Lang
Written by Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris based on the novel by Frances Hogson Burnett
1939/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] [last lines] Sara Crewe: Your Majesty. My Dad.[/box] Shirley Temple Black died today.  She gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure through a very dark time and went on to be the U.S. representative to the UN and U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.  She was 85.  May she rest in peace.  Her obituary can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/arts/shirley-temple-black-screen-star-dies-at-85.html?_r=0

Oddly enough, one of her movies was next up for me to watch.  I remember this made me cry as a child.  It seems more calculated now but there are still some nice moments.

The year is 1899.  The place is London.  Captain Crewe is called up for duty in the Boer War and puts his daughter Sara (Temple) into a snobby boarding school for girls.  The Captain comes from a very good family and owns a diamond mine so the irrepressible Sara is catered to by the stern headmistress (Mary Nash).  Everyone takes to calling her “The Little Princess.”  Then her father turns up in the roster of the dead and the headmistress discovers his property was confiscated by the Boers.  Sara, now an orphan, becomes a kind of scullery maid and lives in Dickensian conditions in the attic of the school.  Sara refuses to believe that her father is really dead and continues to search for him among the wounded.  With Arthur Treacher as an ex-music hall performer, Cesar Romero as an Indian servant, and Anita Louise and Richard Greene as the obligatory young lovers. This is quite OK.  I was surprised to find it had been shot in color since I think the only times I had seen it before were on our old black and white TV.  I think Mary Nash was the standout   She was particularly good in Sara’s dream sequence.

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