War Babies

A SHIRLEY TEMPLE Short Subject.

It can get mighty rough at Buttermilk Pete's Cafe when the local contingency of diaper-clad WAR BABIES come in for their midday milk break.

This primitive little film - a spoof of military movies - provides a few chuckles, but little else: tiny tots talking tough can begin to pall in a short time. Shirley Temple, playing a duplicitous hip-swinging French miss, hasn't much to do in this pre-celebrity performance. Highlight: the real signs of toddler temper when a few of the infants unexpectedly get well & truly soaked with milk.

Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.

I love these "Diaper Baby" movies! You couldn't make a movie like this today and it is rich in cinematic history. It is goofy and the film was made to make you laugh, which it does. How they ever got these kids to "act" I'll never know. I think they are precious and the kids make me laugh but so do the others who made this movie as it shows the naiveté that existed in the early 30's. You have to remember that this is when the film industry was very young, the stock market had crashed, the world wide depression was beginning and these films were made to give a person a break from the real world. The fact that you could see movies for five cents is beyond my comprehension, but then dinner for 25 cents is too. It was a different time with a totally different mind set.

This is a peculiar and rather uncomfortable feature from the early days of Shirley Temple's career. It's rather strange to see such a complete contrast between the innocent, almost syrupy tone of her best-known full-length movies and the risqué, often rather inappropriate nature of many of her early short features. If nothing else, it provides some interesting examples of how the perspectives of the time differed from those of today.

Temple, at four years of age, is part of a cast consisting entirely of equally young children (as was also the case in many of her earliest short movies). She plays a dancer who entertains a group of soldiers in a café, soon becoming the source of a rivalry between two of them. Besides the basic story line, there are a lot of isolated gag ideas, many of them using milk in one way or another.

The children are depicted as thoroughly amoral characters, leading to a lot of situations that the vast majority of today's viewers would find uncomfortable or even disturbing. Certainly, no film-maker today could film such material using children without suffering irrevocable consequences to his or her career. Setting aside whatever one's personal feelings may be, it points out some very different attitudes or sensitivities - and of course, there are things that are routinely accepted in today's movies that would have provoked nearly universal outrage in the 1940s.

If you can set aside the uncomfortable nature of the material, there are probably a handful of amusing moments. The intent was obviously to use the children to satirize adult behavior, and on occasion it works. But, to be painfully honest, it's just not really a very good movie anyway. Besides the racy behavior of the child actors, they threw in some racial stereotypes, apparently just for good measure, and then the constant emphasis on milk is a bit odd in itself.

One thing, though, that does stand out is that Temple has an obvious energy and screen presence that transcends both her character and the nature of the material. It's no surprise that she could be spotted and groomed for stardom even while performing in things like this. What's a little less expected is to see such a complete contrast between the movies for which she is usually remembered and the movies that gave her a start.

Okay, Shirley Temple plays a singer in this film short during wartime. Her skirt is ultra short and inappropriate now and wonder why the censors didn't notice it then. Also, the boys are supposed to be soldiers but they don't wear shirts. I know they're supposed to act like adults as children but I felt uncomfortable seeing the children exposed in an unhealthy manner. The boys and girls acted like adults even though they were small children but still I can't believe that the censors allowed the children to be dressed in such a manner to expose them to the world audience. Maybe they didn't notice it then about the negative reaction, I know I would never allow my son to go shirtless at a young age or my daughter to wear a short skirt to the thigh. I was a little disturbed by it all and I'm glad that it's not aired on television anymore.

I remember my grandmother giving me this tape when I was a child, because she was going to throw it away. It contained Dora's Dunking Donuts and War Babies. Thinking back, I had to take the tape with me, whenever I spent the night at a friend's or a relative's. My favorite scene in War Babies was with the dog. Shirley Temple's character marches up to the dog, who in turn, barks at her. She runs back to the little boy and says, "I'm afraid!" And when another little boy goes to chase the dog away, the dog ends up chasing him out, but returns with the child's diaper. This tape has been passed back and forth between me and my sister over the years. I recently came across it in a storage box in my closet and gave it to my sister to keep.