Featuring America’s favorite sweetheart during the Depression, The Shirley Temple Collection, Volume 2 includes three titles: “Baby Take a Bow,” “Bright Eyes,” and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
Revived from Fox Home Entertainment’s vault, all three films are digitally remastered and restored, featuring state-of-the-art colorization technology, offering audiences both color and black-and-white versions. The set also includes a charm bracelet with three exclusive commemorative charm bracelets. Each title is also available individually, packaged with a single charm.
With her famous dimpled smile, Shirley Temple was the country’s most popular movie star for three years, from 1935 to 1938.
Baby Takes a Bow
When little Shirley Ellison (Temple) ex-con father (James Dunn) is accused of stealing a pearl necklace, the youngster springs into action to solve the mystery through a hilarious game of hide and seek. Featuring fan favorite “On Account a I Love You,” this film will remind you why Shirley Temple has been called “America’s biggest little star.”
Bright Eyes
In this heart-rending treasure, Temple delights as Shirley, the adored mascot for a group of aviators. Although she is the subject of a custody battle among a curmudgeon uncle, a kindly pilot and a high-society woman, Shirley never loses her spirit, or her sense of humor. This enjoyable film contains one of Shirley’s signature songs, “On The Good Ship Lollipop.”
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
While in the care of her gruff, over-protective aunt, an adorable tyke with singing and dancing abilities (Temple) catches the eye of a talent scout. Soon, the gifted youngster is sought after for the first big-time, but can she convince her aunt to let her star shine The film has several memorable moments, including Shirley’s song-and-dance number with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
Shirley Temple’s Biography
Born on April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, California, Shirley Temple was the daughter of a bank teller. She began taking dancing classes at the age of three, and was chosen from among her classmates to appear in a series of one-reel films before she reached four. The series, called “Baby Burlesks,” consisted of takeoffs on popular movies of the time, with Shirley playing the leading lady roles, imitating Marlene Dietrich and other famous stars.
At that same time, she began playing bit parts in feature films. Temple first attracted attention in a song-and-dance number, “Baby Take a Bow,” which she performed admirably in the film, Stand Up and Cheer. She was consequently signed by Fox and within months reached unprecedented heights of popularity. At the end of the first year as a child star, she received a special Academy Award “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year 1934.” By 1938, this cute, precocious child, complete with dimples and curls, had topped all other Hollywood stars as the number one box-office attraction, providing a bright little spot in the Depression years.
At the height of her success, she was a national institution, a model for the child every mother wanted and every girl tried to imitate. A whole industry developed around the Shirley Temple phenomenon: dolls, coloring books, dresses, etc. No child star before or after her enjoyed so great popularity, or was able to display a wider range of natural talents, as an actress, dancer, and singer.
However, by 1940, Temple was quickly approaching the status of has-been. She terminated her Fox contract, following two flops, but fared no better at MGM, which let her go after only one picture. Temple continued to appear in films of various studios through the late 1940s, but she did not hold the same appeal as an adolescent-ingnue that she had held as a child.
Temple attempted a comeback on TV in 1957, as the hostess of “The Shirley Temple Storybook,” but the show was not renewed after its first season. She tried again with “The Shirley Temple Show” in 1960, but the results were similarly discouraging.
In the late 1960s, she entered politics and ran unsuccessfully for the vacant Republican congressional seat of her home district of San Mateo, California. In 1968, she was appointed by President Nixon as the U.S. representative at the United Nations. She served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, when she became the U.S. Chief of Protocol. In 1989, President George Bush appointed her ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
In 1949, she divorced from actor John Agar, whom she had married at 17, in 1945. Temple married in 1950 TV executive Charles Black and is officially known as Shirley Temple Black. In 1988, she published her memoirs, “Child Star.”
