America's favorite moppet Shirley Temple may have met her match in scene stealing with Lionel Barrymore playing her grandfather. Just watching Barrymore taking back his scenes from Temple makes The Little Colonel an enjoyable film to watch.Barrymore complete with white suit, Panatella, and goatee with long white hair looks like the spitting image of Colonel Sanders. He's one reconstructed old rebel and what Lee and Grant signed at Appomattox has no bearing on him. All he has to hear is that his daughter Evelyn Venable has taken unto herself a Yankee for a husband and he disowns her. So she and John Davis Lodge go first north and west and have themselves a daughter.When Lodge goes into the west with a couple of shifty partners in a prospecting deal, he sends Venable and the little girl they have now back south to live with grandfather. Well kind of, as they take a gate cottage to live in. But as these Shirley Temple movies go, you know it's Shirley who brings all the warring parties together. Who could resist.The Little Colonel is known for that famous dance that Bill Robinson does with Shirley Temple on the staircase. It's still as entertaining as it ever was. The last couple of minutes are in color in which all the principal players appeared in that for the first time.The scenes with Barrymore and Temple are absolutely precious. Just who was the best capturer of the audience's attention. Judge for yourself.

This movie was made in 1935. It's amazing how progressive its messages are. Lionel Barrymore is wooden in his role as Temple's grandfather, and the plot is beyond lame; but Shirley Temple still is fully convincing as Lloyd Sherman--a precocious, color-blind, and happiness-inducing five- year-old child of the 1870s. Hattie McDaniel, Bill Robinson, and Avonne Jackson are amazing in their rapport with Temple. There are some pretty clever lines that are really, really funny--many of them about ignorance, stubbornness, and prejudice. This movie is crying out loud for the attention of a rhetorician or a cultural studies theorist!

I always get THE LITTLEST REBEL and THE LITTLE COLONEL mixed up when I think of SHIRLEY TEMPLE films, but while they both have the same sort of background (the Civil War and post-Civil War), the quality of entertainment is vastly different.This one gets off to a painfully dull start, with Shirley's mother (EVELYN VENABLE) running off with a Yankee (JOHN BOLES), and later returning home with her little girl only to find that the grandfather has never forgiven her for marrying a Yank. Naturally, it's up to little Shirley to melt the heart of the crusty grandfather (LIONEL BARRYMORE) and we all know how that's going to turn out.What makes the film interesting are the dance segments with BILL ROBINSON, as the tap dancing servant, most memorably in the staircase dance that is always shown whenever there are film clips from any of Shirley's Fox films. And for an added surprise, there's the finale which is photographed in three strip Technicolor and gave the world its first glimpse of the child star in color.Summing up: Racial elements are plentiful but, hey, this was 1935--a different world then--but the story is so wishy-washy that it's only suitable for die hard Temple fans.

Personally, I think this is Shirley's best movie. It's got a good story (rare in children's movies), my favorite actor (Lionel Barrymore), great acting from a 5-yr-old child (Shirley), great dance numbers with Bojangles, lots of servant put-downs of their masters (as when Bojangles calls his master a fool)and also lots of humor, as when Shirley throws the chess set onto the floor, strikes an angry pose, and tells her Grandpa, "You're a bad man!". I smile every time I see that. The little 5-yr-old girl put the 70-something old guy in his place.If you've not yet seen the Little Colonel, I recommend you buy or rent it now. It's a great introduction to the actress Shirley Temple, and you can see why she was the number one star in 1936, 37, and 38.