Glad Rags to Riches

This short one-reeler features Shirley Temple as Diaperina, heading a children-only cast of three-to-five year olds, performing in a broad burlesque as the star of a floor show at the "Lullaby Lobster Palace", dancing and singing "She's Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage", to represent her servitude to the evil nightclub owner (Georgie Smith). Directed by Charles Lamont, who is generally credited as being Temple's discoverer, and produced by Jack Hays, who put together most of her early Screencraft short features, this effort is intentionally silly, and there is little evidence among the disjointed episodes of the star's later self-possession, with wooden performances by the moppet players, although Eugene Butler is somewhat winning as Elmer, hayseed paramour of Diaperina, who has come to the big city to find and rescue her; of historic interest only.

Although I will readily acknowledge that Shirley Temple was an amazing child actress (probably the best ever), her early short films were, for the most part, god-awful. Imagine a series of short comedies (?) where THE joke was seeing toddlers behaving like adults. So, you see 2 and 3 and 4 year-olds acting like it's a romantic film and spouting drivel and dressing VERY inappropriately--that's what these films from Educational Films were like. Today, I assume most who see them will be creeped out--especially because you can't help but think that pedophiles loved the films! As for everyone else, I can only assume that mental illness was running rampant in 1933--elsewise, why would they have made films like "Glad Rags to Riches"?! This film once again finds Shirley as a vamp (uggh!). She is fought over by little boys and allures them with her exotic singing and dancing. For me, seeing a long row of chorus girls (age about 3 each) made me want to rinse out my eyes with Clorox! Creepy and dumb. And, difficult to watch without captions, as these WERE very little kids who had difficulty uttering their lines intelligibly.

Yes, Hollywood has always been a disturbed place especially for children in the entertainment business. Unlike adults, children performers were poorly paid and after all it was still the Great Depression where money was tight everywhere. The Baby Burlesque has kids playing adult roles. In this one, Shirley Temple plays a cabaret singer and dancer at a nightclub. It is the kids who rule the world. I am disturbed by the boys going shirtless and wearing diapers. They weren't disposable. Shirley Temple and the cast obviously don't realize they're spoofing adult films with the same stories. The early cinema showed short films like this before the major presentation instead of commercials.