Adventure in Baltimore

I saw this movie about ten years ago and absolutely loved it! It made me laugh and cry. I have always been amazed when I hear of Shirley Temples "struggle" to have successful movies as an adult. I think she was delightful and had a real gift for comedy. I am sorry her career ended so soon and can't help but wonder what we're now missing out on because of it. I am also frustrated that her later movies are not made available on DVD...at least hardly any. I think people could now begin to appreciate her...to rediscover the adult Shirley, because they'd be able to see her in a fresh way...something they had trouble with years ago. Adventure in Baltimore is a movie that makes you long for the innocence of the day and at the same time cheer for new youthful freedoms. I found myself really involved in her situations and couldn't wait to see what would come next. If you want a great and entertaining afternoon, just hope some channel is playing this movie and enjoy!

I wasn't that impressed by the first half or so of this film. Shirley Temple plays Dinah Sheldon--a very liberated and modern young woman who ruffles many folks' feathers in this turn of the 20th century slice of life film. Now Dinah is never bad--just way ahead of her time and the narrow-minded folks back in 1905 couldn't stand a woman pushing for equal rights. Much of this portion seemed kooky and silly--and very inconsequential. Fortunately, midway through the film, things picked up. Dinah enters a very nice picture in a contest--and the local gossips begin ripping her apart and impugning her good name. This is particularly hard for her father, the Reverend (Robert Young)--as stands firmly behind Dinah regardless of the consequences to himself. He plays a guy very much like Jim Anderson from "Father Knows Best"--very wise, gentle and kind. This portion was both heartwarming and interesting--far more than the earlier part of the film. Overall, a nice little family film that starts slowly (and a bit too kooky) and ends on a very high note.

After a few successful teen-age roles (and a couple of ill-fated ones), Shirley's uneven career as a young lady was not helped by this routine romantic comedy of the early 1900s in which she plays a rebellious daughter of a minister (Robert Young) with shocking ideas about love. As a crusader for women's suffrage, Shirley seems more petulant than feisty, playing a girl who crusades for women's suffrage. Nice to see Robert Young in his pre-Father Knows Best days. The film has an attractive look with handsome photography and a good feel for the period atmosphere, but the script is too lightweight to carry much conviction. Pleasant enough if you want to see what Shirley Temple looked like at this stage in her career. She had three more "clinkers" to go before quitting the screen.

Her then-husband John Agar wasn't much help--here he comes across as a wooden actor, not well suited to comedy. Pleasant enough film, but just a trifle.

I'm not sure what kind of adventure folks were having in 1905 Baltimore, but it's clear to me that RKO was trying to cash in on a bit of the nostalgia gold that MGM found with Meet Me In St. Louis. There's no musical score in Adventure In Baltimore, but Shirley Temple taking the place of Judy Garland provides a nice wholesome image of a young woman who was questioning just what woman's place was in society as so many thousands of others were doing in America in 1905.

Shirley's a preacher's kid and her father is an amused and tolerant, but slightly put out Robert Young. The film opens with her returning to Baltimore because she's been expelled from a Ladies Finishing School, the kind of places that would shortly go out of date and style. She's been espousing such radical ideas as woman's suffrage and she wants to be an artist.

In addition to a slightly exasperated father, Shirley's also got a more than slightly exasperated young man who is interested in her in her then real life husband John Agar. One of the funniest scenes in the film is Agar at an oratorical society meeting delivering a speech expressing Temple's progressive ideas. The problem is she did not change the pronouns and poor Agar is making a big old fool of himself. Later on a 'scandalous' painting Temple does of Agar causes great concern and is used against Young who is being touted for the position of Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Baltimore.

Robert Young was made up to look a great deal older than he was at the time the film was made. With his graying hair and with it curled the way it was, Young looks like Robert Donat as he was in Goodbye Mr. Chips. It made me think that Donat might have been who RKO had in mind originally for the plot. Nevertheless Young does fine in the role and his scenes with Shirley have some real tenderness to them.

Adventure In Baltimore is not as good as Meet Me In St. Louis, but the film is nice family entertainment.

Mild sitcom, from a story by Christopher Isherwood of all people, about a pastor's rebellious daughter in the stuffy upper-middle-class Baltimore of 1905. Though it's handsomely photographed, there's no Baltimore atmosphere here; it could as easily be Milwaukee or St. Louis, and in fact, the strong-family-ties theme, aggressive nostalgia, boy-next-door puppy love, and sleeve-tugging sentimentality play like a less well-written "Meet Me in St. Louis." Robert Young, top-billed and with a mustache and silly hair, does a tolerable warmup for "Father Knows Best"; he furrows his brow a lot and makes pronouncements. (But the height of the plot arc, in which he delivers a give-'em-hell sermon to his hypocritical congregation, is unaccountably omitted from the script.) The only real surprise of the movie is how amazingly uninteresting a 21-year-old Shirley Temple is. She simpers, she searches for her key light to be never anything but as attractive as possible, she tries to convey adolescent feistiness, but her line readings are monotonously alike, and she has no inner life. Nor is it wise to pair her with then-husband John Agar, in what's essentially the Tom Drake role; he's as dull as Tom Drake. The script puts the two through some very contrived roadblocks on the road to love, including a hard-to-believe episode of her unintentionally instigating a riot, a harder-to-believe one of him reading a speech of hers out loud and forgetting to change the pronouns, and an unpalatable one of her lying to him about painting his portrait. I wouldn't even root for such a selfish young miss. RKO must have figured, well, she's Shirley Temple, the audience will be on her side no matter what. I wasn't, and while the denouement is rushed to the point of incoherence, I wasn't sorry to see this one end.