Although I will readily acknowledge that Shirley Temple was an amazing child actress (probably the best ever), her early short films were, for the most part, god-awful. Imagine a series of short comedies (?) where THE joke was seeing toddlers behaving like adults. So, you see 2 and 3 and 4 year-olds acting like it's a romantic film and spouting drivel and dressing VERY inappropriately--that's what these films from Educational Films were like. Today, I assume most who see them will be creeped out--especially because you can't help but think that pedophiles loved the films! As for everyone else, I can only assume that mental illness was running rampant in 1933--elsewise, why would they have made films like "Glad Rags to Riches"?! This film once again finds Shirley as a vamp (uggh!). She is fought over by little boys and allures them with her exotic singing and dancing. For me, seeing a long row of chorus girls (age about 3 each) made me want to rinse out my eyes with Clorox! Creepy and dumb. And, difficult to watch without captions, as these WERE very little kids who had difficulty uttering their lines intelligibly.
