Little Big Shot

Mortimer Thompson (Edward Everett Horton) and Steve Craig (Robert Armstrong) are con-men working the streets and selling fake watches. They are broke and hope to make a play on old acquaintance Gibbs. They mistakenly assume that he's rich. Gibbs and his daughter Gloria (Sybil Jason) are on the run from the gangster Kell Norton. After Kell kills Gibbs, the two cons take on Gloria as their charge. Jean (Glenda Farrell) is the hat check girl.

Warner Bros. Tries to make Sybil Jason as the new Shirley Temple. She can't do anything other than be a shadow of the superstar. In the end, she would play supporting roles to Shirley and that would be the end of her career. I have nothing against the child actress. She does all the things. She's cute. She sings and dances. She either has an accent or a lisp. She would be perfectly fine if not pushed by the studio as a Shirley rival.

Warner definitely seems to have seen Sybil Jason as their answer to Shirley Temple, and this film takes many elements from "Little Miss Marker", which Shirley starred in the year before. But the screenplay spends a good deal of time with the gangsters who are the cause of Sybil's troubles, and there is a very real sense of Depression-era desperation. Director Michael Curtiz makes all this very vivid, framing and lighting the shots to give this urban melodrama a hard edge. Robert Armstrong gives an excellent performance as one of the con men who takes Sybil in. This film may be a little too intense for Shirley Temple fans, but it's a strong melodrama with a solid cast.

Five-year-old Sybil Jason, or "The Countess', with her wonderful clear English diction, is orphaned, and teams up with two cheap four-flushers, the con men Steve (Robert Armstrong) and Mortimer (Edward Everett Horton) on Broadway in depression New York.

What a masterful performance Sybil gave! A true work of acting genius. We first see her in the "Ritz" with her father, Steve and Mortimer eating a palatial dinner neither her gambling indebted father, nor the broke four flushers can afford. Abandoned by her father, Sybil ends up at the con men's cheap hotel. Later, lost on the street in Broadway with three black children, she performs masterful song, dance and imitation routines that can only be compared to the VERY BEST of Shirley Temple and Mitzi Green. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes in cinema history, Steve abandons her at an orphanage where, sobbing, she carries a suitcase nearly as big as herself down the walkway and collapses on the stairs to the front door. Beyond that, you'll have to see the rest of the movie.

Sybil runs the gamut of emotions in her acting, always with her special girlish English accent. Her voice rings like a perfectly tuned bell. With her big brown eyes, she alternates masterfully between a little girl's joy, pain, laughter, longing, affection and fear.

The movie itself is extremely well done. Not your usual depression era child mush-fest, the movie works on many levels -- beyond the little lost orphan story, it is a masterful, tough gangster film, a love story, and a glittering, multi-faceted cinematographic gem of depression era Broadway street scenes.

Favorite line --

The Countess: "I'll be good. I won't say a word. I'll just sit in the corner and eat a lollipop"

Let's hope that the classic movie cable channels dig up some more of Sybil's lost films.

Is this another Damon Runyon story, like "Little Miss Marker"? It all sounds too familiar. As far as giving way for the black kids in the film, look up Sybil Jason's biography and you might a bit of British Jewishness in there (her uncle Harry Jacobson was a British band leader), which didn't sit well with Hollywood in those days.

Maybe that's why she didn't get too far. I was born in Hollywood, BTW, and I know a lot of Hollywood stuff and stories. My schools were full of child actors, my mother went to junior high in Hollywood with Judy Garland, before going to the MGM Schoolhouse. And Ricardo Montalban was a classmate of my mother.

Glenda Farrell is gorgeous and glamorous, as always. And Edward Everett Horton as a soda jerk is hysterical.

I guess we were allowed to only have one Shirley Temple, so there were probably a few little girls given chances who did not do the box office and thus they have been consigned to the dustheap of the forgotten.

This little girl deserved better as she was quite talented. Mainly as an actress, she really put the character across, this cute, self-assured, gregarious little gal who befriends all she meets. The trick is not making her TOO adorable, and somehow she pulls it off despite scenes where she is crying on the steps of an orphanage or when her dog is kicked by an evil gangster. She's a little robotic in her Temple-esque musical numbers, but as an actress she had the chops. Only wish she would have shared some of the earnings with the black kids after she horns in on their street act!

As the lead guy, Armstrong really shines as a character we have seen before, the no-good guy who is turned soft by a kid. He makes it fresh by never seeming like too hard a guy to begin with, and not going too soft too soon. Horton helps out a great deal.

The girl ends up being exposed to a surprising lot of violence and emotional turmoil before the whole thing winds up. But that's what you get sometimes!