Again I reiterate that Shirley Temple Black was a remarkable classy woman. This is not an attempt to tear her down, but rather to show that - although no fault of her own (as she was just a child) that it is not true that she was not depicted as provocative in her time. This is what Hollywood did to her. If anyone thinks this is skewed please let me know. I'll be glad to admit I'm wrong.
The Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...hild-star-of-all-time-with-wit-and-grace.html
"Not all the world fell in love with this ringleted, dimpled, singing and dancing doll, though. The novelist Graham Greene, reviewing Captain January, found the film "a little depraved," adding: "Some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss [Claudette] Colbert's and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich's."
Greene, who had elsewhere referred to Temple as "a 50-year-old dwarf," went a great deal further in his review of Wee Willie Winkie: "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."
Twentieth Century-Fox (as it was by this time known) promptly sued.
Greene and his publisher, the magazine Night And Day, were subsequently obliged to pay £3,500 in damages to the studio and to Temple, referred to by Greene as "that little bitch."
While Greene's insinuations were snide, there were others who also felt that the presentation of Temple sometimes lacked taste. In Curly Top, for example, she appeared as a naked cupid, smeared from head to toe in gold paint, causing the film to be banned in Denmark for "corruption."
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...ldhood-destroyed-Hollywood.html#ixzz2t5uTWfpD
"Her earliest encounter with the entertainment world would certainly raise concern by 2014 standards. Temple got her start at age three acting in “Baby Burlesks,” which today's New York Times describes as "a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts in which children played all the roles." When kids on set misbehaved, they were sent to a black sound booth where they'd sit on a block of ice. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche,” she would later write.
In the years after those shorts, she would rise to international fame in films likeLittle Miss Marker, Heidi, and The Little Princess. She was beloved, but not everyone felt comfortable with the way Hollywood capitalized on her youth. Graham Greene would flee the country after a libel suit followed his critical review of Wee Willie Winkie:
The owners of a child star are like leaseholders--their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has a peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. [...] 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."
Read more:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...hild-star-who-wasnt-a-cautionary-tale/283747/
Home Alone With The Adorable Child
http://books.google.com/books?id=Is...=onepage&q=shirley temple provocative&f=false
The History of Sex in Cinema
Movie Title/Year and Film/Scene Description
Screenshots
Baby Burlesks Shorts: (1932-1933)
A prime example of child exploitation films were the eight Educational Pictures' Baby Burlesks shorts (15-minute one reelers with toddlers playing adult roles and wearing provocative clothing). All of them featured four-year-old Shirley Temple. Tasteless films such as these led to an outcry for more wholesome films that didn't eroticize children.
Runt Page (1932)
War Babies (1932)
The Pie-Covered Wagon (1932)
Glad Rags to Riches (1933)
Kid in Hollywood (1933)
The Kid's Last Fight (1933)
Polly Tix in Washington (1933)
Kid 'in' Africa (1933)
The young Temple's first film appearance was in Runt Page (1932) as Lulu Parsnips (a take-off on Louella Parsons). In the second film War Babies (1932), Temple (as Charmaine) accepted a large lollypop from doughboy little boys. In Kid in Hollywood (1933), Temple was cast with the titillating name Morelegs Sweettrick (a play on the name Marlene Dietrich).
In Polly Tix in Washington (1933), Temple took the part of Polly Tix, a high-priced call girl/prostitute (!) sent by corrupt officials to influence a backwoods politician.
http://www.filmsite.org/sexinfilms5.html