Little Miss Broadway *** (1938, Shirley Temple, George Murphy, Jimmy Durante, Edna May Oliver, Phyllis Brooks ) – Classic Movie Review 9198

The teaming of Shirley Temple and Jimmy Durante is the main attraction and high point of director Irving Cummings’s pleasant 1938 musical Little Miss Broadway, though George Murphy and Edna May Oliver are good value too.

Little Miss Broadway, of course, has to be curly Temple, playing an orphan (again!), Betsy Brown, who sparks up the lives of music-hall acts who live in mean old hotel owner Sarah Wendling (Oliver)’s rooming house for show business folk.

Pop Shea (Edward Ellis), the friend of Betsy’s late parents, runs the boarding house for theatrical performers, but old Sarah Wendling, who is also the next-door neighbour of the building she owns, detests show people and their noise. [Spoiler alert] It all has the happiest of endings, of course, when Sarah’s nephew Roger (George Murphy) and Pop Shea’s daughter Barbara (Phyllis Brooks) announce their intention to marry and to adopt Betsy, and even old Sarah changes her mind.

The tunes (Music by Harold Spina and Lyrics by Walter Bullock) include ‘Little Miss Broadway’, ‘How Can I Thank You?’, ‘If All the World Were Paper’, ‘Be Optimistic’, ‘We Should Be Together’, and ‘Swing Me an Old-Fashioned Song’, all performed by Temple.

Also in the cast are George Barbier, Jane Darwell, El Brendel, Donald Meek, Claude Gillingwater, Russell Hicks, Charles Williams, Charles Coleman, Patricia Wilder, George Brasno, Olive Brasno, Brooks Benedict, Ed Brady and Syd Saylor.

Little Miss Broadway is directed by Irving Cummings, runs 72 minutes, is made and released by 20th Century Fox, is written by Harry Tugend (original screen play) and Jack Yellen (original screen play), is shot in black and white by Arthur C Miller, is produced by Darryl F Zanuck and David Hempstead, and is scored by Walter Bullock, Harold Spina and Louis Silvers, with Art Direction by Bernard Herzbrun and Hans Peters.

The dances are staged by Nick Castle and Geneva Sawyer. Murphy was dissatisfied with the dance routine on ‘We Should Be Together’ and insisted it be reshot. Temple agreed despite her mother’s concerns, and the routine so pleased the crew that the stars gave an encore performance for them.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 9198

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