Adventure in Baltimore

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.

Plot-- A reverend's 1905 family must find a way to adjust to the eldest daughter's instincts for equality at a time when women were denied many opportunities. Meanwhile, Dad may lose his chance to become a bishop because of town gossip over his daughter.

Looks like the misleading title and Shirley's rebellious upstart were meant to provide some edge to her squeaky-clean image. However, the results are what could be expected of the Temple brand—a wholesome little family drama, on the order of Father Knows Best. As daughter Dinah, Shirley manages to keep her feminist instincts within appealing bounds; at the same time, she defies confining norms placed on 1905 women. The rebellious context is carefully calibrated so as to be acceptable to 1949 audiences without offending the values of that later time. Note how in the movie Dinah's desire for women's suffrage is endorsed, but not her inclination for a career as a painter. That accords with norms of the late-40's when women still weren't expected to have careers. Careers would come later in the 1960's.

As Pastor Sheldon, Young is likably bland in the type role soon to define him. More importantly, as the voice of reason and church authority, he gives official approval to his daughter's actions. So the audience knows she's more than just rebellious— she's on the right track. On the other hand, too bad the studio didn't hire a more appealing swain than the dull- as-cement John Agar. But then he's certainly no competition for his then real life wife.

On the whole, the movie tells us more about Temple's career and the social norms of two historical periods than anything else. However, I'm still wondering how this revealing slice of fluff escaped from RKO's dream factory that was then turning out noirs by the dozen.

Shirley Temple was capable of turning in better performances than "Baltimore" as she transitioned to adulthood, but the script (a flashback to 1905?) and the other actors were not people she could play off well.

Just two years earlier, Temple had a major hit with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant in "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer". In this, the script was sharper and funnier. It was in the present day, focusing on Shirley's growth, and she had the dependable Myrna Loy to work off. Loy, while projecting a solid and comedic presence herself, always went out of her way to make sure the other actors were comfortable with her and with their role. In this case, when an agitated Temple kept showing up for work due to marriage difficulties, Loy sent her a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a heartfelt note, bonding the two actors for the rest of their lives.

Loy was the rock in every comedic group of actors she worked with. She went out of her way to allow the other actors to feel comfortable and do their best work, a proactive behavior she had learned when working with Clark Gable, Melvyn Douglas, Spencer Tracy, William Powell, Clifton Webb and numerous other co-stars.

Loy's steady and dependable acting allowed both Shirley and Cary Grant to be more expressive than the script indicates, making the movie a giant success and bringing Shirley's (adult) acting into the limelight once again. With this freedom, she could be herself and act. The result was a half million dollars for RKO and a runaway hit's publicity for Temple.

In "Baltimore" Shirley has no such attachments and no such freedom. There was no Myrna Loy to make her feel alive and open. The movie doesn't work well because there is little chemistry between the actors, even between Temple and her husband, John Agar, who did a good job with his role. A period piece was not something Temple needed. She was growing up and needed to be seen in the present day, as she was in "Bobbysoxer". Instead, and unfortunately, she is to go through several more scripts that do not fit her burgeoning character, and thus are movie flops, before finally calling it quits.

Shirley Temple had the acting skills to continue making movies, but she needed adult scripts and actors around her who were supportive, like Loy. It's a shame she hung up her shingle and simply quit. All she needed was the right "magic" around her.

It is beautifully filmed by Robert de Grasse. And Robert Young's character is appealing and even admirable. This seems like a dry run for his most famous role, the title character in "Father Knows Best." Here he is a father in two ways: He has children, including Shirley Temple. And he is an Episcopal priest (under consideration for Bishop of his Diocese.) Shirley Temple is the main character. She is meant to be saucy and ahead of her time. But she's very hard to like. The escapade in which her boyfriend, John Agar, borrows a speech from her for a debating contest isn't admirable. And right here, it's hard to imagine that a priest would laugh off his daughter's involvement in such dishonesty.

Then she paints Agar. She promises she will just use his body as a starting point -- no face. But the painting is exhibited in a show and everyone sees that she has painted him in a bathing suit. That would have been extremely risqué for 1905. What would be the equivalent 101 years later? Something on the Internet or in an X-rated video.

All this while her father is being considered for Bishop. I wonder what Christopher Isherwood's original story was like. Maybe she was a forerunner to Sally Bowles. Here, however, she is sullen, pampered, and selfish.

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.