GR: Bianca & Shirley Temple: They was askin' for it

[David Morris]

Night and Day, October 28, 1937 The Films by Graham Greene

Wee Willie Winkie

The owners of a child star are like leaseholders — their property
diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their backs:
before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a
matrimonial squabble? Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar
interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret
and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece —
real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In
Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a
Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance:
her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie,
wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering
stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited
expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is
raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with
dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across
the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.