Recommending a Shirley Temple movie on DVD is so un-hip that it’s practically hip. You’ve probably never seen her strangest movie, “The Blue Bird” (1940). It wasn’t included in the package of her Fox features that was released to TV in the late 1950s and has been shown endlessly ever since. It’s based on a fantasy novel by Maurice Maeterlinck that was adapted for the screen three times — all three flops, including Shirley’s version and a later one U.S.-Russian coproduction directed by George Cukor with Elizabeth Taylor.
Shirley’s was intended as Fox’s very expensive answer to “The Wizard of Oz,” after her studio studio refused to loan her out to MGM. Based on her stiff and awkward performance as a spoiled youngster in “The Blue Bird,” we should all be grateful she didn’t play Dorothy. There are some striking similarities to “Oz,” as Shirley and her brother go looking for the Blue Bird of Happiness, accompanied by humanoid versions of their dog and their cat (the latter well played by Gale Sondergaard, originally slated as Glinda in “Oz”). The color cinematography is spectacular, as are the massive sets.
But where “Oz” is charming, “The Blue Bird” gets downright creepy, especially when the kids meet up with their dead grandparents and get to watch children in Heaven waiting to be born. “The Blue Bird” was reportedly cut by half an hour just before its premiere, and ended a long string of box-office smashes for Shirley, who made just one more movie for Fox.
The set also includes Shirley’s other Technicolor opus for Fox, the far better known “The Little Princess,” which is also one of her best movies. (Walter Lang directed it just before he did “The Blue Bird.”) The transfer isn’t anywhere near as good as “The Blue Bird,” but it’s still light years better than the smeary public-domain DVDs that have been circulating for years.
Both are included in Fox’s fifth Shirley Temple box set along with a true curio, “Stand Up and Cheer.” Shirley isn’t the star of this bizarre Depression-themed musical; Warner Baxter, straight from “42nd Street,” plays FDR’s Secretary of Amusement and Madge Evans is his Gal Friday. Shirley has one big number and appears in footage that appears to have been cut into the finale after production wrapped. Curiously, this is the first of Temple’s black-and-white pictures that Fox is not offering with an optional colorized version on DVD. So you’ll just have to see Aunt Jemima (the Italian-American actress who specialized in blackface roles, not the Pancake Icon) in black-and-white. Which gives us this thought: now that Uncle Ben has been rendered politically correct by being promoted to CEO, why doesn’t the Walt Disney Company make Uncle Remus Chairman of the Mouse House Board? Then they could free “The Song of the South” from the shackles of political correctness and finally put it out on DVD.