Dubious Moments in Film Criticism: Graham Greene vs.
Shirley Temple

post from Nerve.com on 01 December 2006 04:08:27 PM. © Nerve.com

The Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon got me thinking about the kind of difference a critic can make. Not much, for the most part ? certainly very little in the long run. But I think there is something to be said for those critics ? of film, books, art, etc. -- who raise social red flags well before the culture at large is aware of them.I trust Graham Greene needs no introduction. But while most know him ? rightfully so ? as the celebrated author of masterpieces like The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians, End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory -- he also had a pretty notable film criticism career in the 30s, writing for The Spectator and Night and Day. That is, until he published this twisted, scandalous review of the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie, and wound up in court for libel. Here was the key passage:"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. 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 that is only 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."The sheer cynicism of this review is haunting. And indeed, after all these years, Greene?s review is now disturbing not so much for its perverse overtones (though they?re still there, but more as a means of assuming the perspective of the viewer) but for its dark foresight. At the time, a criticism of the entertainment industry for subtly sexualizing young children was seen as the whims of a demented writer, but the years since have borne out the grim truth in Greene?s sly diatribe. At the same time, one wonders if anyone would have bothered to give it a second look if it hadn?t been written by someone who would go on to become one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. (This particular review is still quite hard to locate -- The Graham Greener Film Reader is the only place I?ve encountered it.)Interesting note: Greene?s review of Wee Willie Winkie didn?t stop that film?s director, John Ford, from adapting Greene?s well-regarded novel The Power and the Glory into the ambitious Henry Fonda film The Fugitive a few years later.

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