little princess

小公主The Little Princess review by Margarita Landazuri

2008-04-26 22:05:56 来源：Internet 浏览次数：410 文字大小：【大】【中】【小】

简介：By 1938, at age 10, Shirley Temple had been a star for half her life. She was still talented, popular, and generally carefree, but she was growing up. And as she recalls in her autobiography, Child St ...

By 1938, at age 10, Shirley Temple had been a star for half her life. She was still talented, popular, and generally carefree, but she was growing up. And as she recalls in her autobiography, Child Star, Temple was becoming more perceptive about the behavior of adults around her, and more aware of her own sometimes troubling emotions. This charged atmosphere was what she would remember best about working on The Little Princess (1939). Based on the Victorian-era novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Little Princess is the story of pampered Sara Crewe, whose widowed father leaves her in a luxurious boarding school while he goes off to fight the Boer War. When he's reported missing, and the money stops flowing in, the cruel headmistress banishes the girl into a garret and turns her into a servant. 20th Century Fox spared no expense on The Little Princess, which was Temple's first Technicolor film, and boasted a strong supporting cast that was perhaps a bit too talented for Shirley's liking.

Playing a cockney maid who becomes Sara's friend was a charming scene-stealer named Sybil Jason. A South African girl a year younger than Temple, Jason had appeared in British films and had been brought to the U.S. by Warner Brothers as a potential rival for Temple. Observing the crew's delighted reaction to Jason's cockney accent when the two girls filmed a scene together, the normally confident Temple felt pangs of jealousy. She recalled that she took out her feelings on another actress, Marcia Mae Jones, who played a schoolgirl who snubs Sara. In a scene where Sara dumps coal ashes on her rival, Temple did so a bit too enthusiastically, then asked director Walter Lang if she could do it again. Lang demurred, and as a repentant Temple shared her treats with Jones, she was disconcerted to learn that Jones envied her because she seemed so happy all the time.

Temple had never had any difficulty crying for a scene, and she had a particularly difficult one coming up, in which she had to make an entrance crying violently. Thinking about Jones' comment as she prepared for her entrance, Temple found she couldn't cry at all. She recalled someone's suggestion that the way to do so was to laugh and cry at the same time, and managed to work herself up into a hysterical fit, which she couldn't stop once the scene was over. Temple's mother had to take her into her dressing room to calm her down.

During the making of The Little Princess, Temple also remembered becoming more aware of pettiness by adults. James Roosevelt, the son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited the set with his wife. When co-star Arthur Treacher made a lighthearted remark that Shirley could be president if she set her mind to it, Temple found the remark insulting to the president, and resented it. And there were other things that bothered her during production; a pet monkey on the set bit her. Temple's own pony, which the studio had hired for a scene, performed badly.