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It is a funny coincidence that a conversation about Shirley Temple as a little tart took place on the current Greenwald forum this morning:

William Whitten -- Writes ·3 hr ago

Discussing the “secret and more adult” appeal of Shirley Temple, Graham Greene wrote in his review of Wee Willie Winkie in 1937, “Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialog drops between their intelligence and their desire.” He also noted her “neat and well-developed rump” and “dimpled depravity.” Twentieth Century Fox sued for libel, Greene fled to Mexico, and a court ordered a settlement of 3,500 pounds.

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Those who read the New York Times obituary of Shirley Temple yesterday may have stopped short at a jarringly inadequate segue:

Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan. The novelist Graham Greene, who was also a film critic, was sued by 20th Century Fox for his review of “Wee Willie Winkie” in the magazine Night and Day, which he edited. In the review, he questioned whether she was a midget and wrote of her “well-shaped and desirable little body” being served up to middle-aged male admirers.

The owners of a child star are like leaseholders—their property diminishes in value every year. … Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry.

Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. …

Graham’s insistence on the sexual subtext of Shirley Temple films wasn’t a one-time event. The year previously, Greene had written a review of Captain January in the Spectator (also reprinted in The Graham Greene Film Reader) in which he wrote that “some of [Temple’s] popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss Colbert’s and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.” But it was the review of Wee Willie Winkie that spurred 20th Century Fox to action: The review hadn’t been published in the U.S., but the studio and Temple’s representatives sued Greene and Night and Day in British court for libel.

https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/graham-greene-and-shirley-temple-what-to-make-of-the-novelists-sexual-review-of-wee-willie-winkie.html

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Wow, Priss must have been quite a gal! I wonder if the replicant Priss in the fillm BLADERUNNER was fashioned after, or a nod to Ms. Fotheringham.

Censorship of sexual content has been an excuse of rulers and governments for ages...to expand that censorship into the political arena is an easy short step.

Thank you for another fascinating article Kathlene!

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