The Littlest Rebel

1935 confederacy propaganda film

Rating: 4/20

Plot: (Warning--Spoilers!) Sweet little Virgie lives with her mother and father on a southern plantation. Her existence is a perfect one--she hosts her own birthday party with her young friends, bosses around the family's slaves and chastises them when they do wrong, and lives it up in the luxuriant comfort of her father's mansion. But then war breaks out and her father must run off to help the southern cause. Virgie has to deal with her father's absence, the burning down of her house, her mother's death, and her father's eventual execution in the only way she knows how--tap dancing and singing!

I had promised somebody that I would watch a Shirley Temple movie by Christmas. I thought it was my first, but she's apparently in Fort Apache. But this is my first time seeing Shirley Temple in her prime, when she was six and tap dancing and dimpling her way into America's hearts. And I've got to say that it was a worse experience than I ever could have imagined. This is a movie seemingly made in a topsy-turvy America, one where the Southerners have the moral high ground; where Northerners are arrogant, cruel brutes; and where slaves are perfectly content with the hand they've been dealt. Maybe the best compliment I can give this movie is that it is Birth of a Nation-esque. Because of the way black and white relationships work in this movie, I don't think it's appropriate for children. There's the stock clown character (a slave, of course, portrayed in a fashion that looks like it's straight off a minstrel show stage) who falls in holes he's dug as traps, contemplates why shoes are called shoes, says the Union can make the weather change because whenever they's around he don't know if it winter or summer out cause he's a-sweatin' and a-shiverin' at the same time, and is told to shut up by multiple characters. And there's something almost shocking about watching Shirley Temple verbally abuse slaves although, admittedly, she seems to be friends with them throughout most of the movie. More offensive to anybody who likes good realistic movie fiction would be scenes in which the soldiers interact with each other, the range of emotions Shirley Temple displays when her mother dies, and the melodrama displayed when Shirley Temple's character shares an apple with Abraham Lincoln. The dated humor will make you cringe rather than laugh, and the dated story might make any intelligent viewer physically ill. But the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae? Five words for ya: Shirley Temple in black face. That's right. Check it: