Shirley Temple stars in this 1939 version of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel about a little, motherless girl left in the care of a girls boarding school by her soldier father, and then made into a servant there when he's missing in action during World War I. The fine tear-jerking film is a good vehicle for the famous moppet, and director Walter Lang (The King and I) makes a memorably lavish production of the Victorian milieu. The final scene, in which our Shirley is helped by one of the most famous women in history, brings down the house. --Tom Keogh
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Spencer Tracy's last performance was in this well-meaning, handsome film by Stanley Kramer about a pair of white parents (Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) trying to make sense of their daughter's impending marriage to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). The film has been knocked over the years for padding conflict and stoking easy liberalism by making Poitier's character in every socioeconomic sense a good catch: But what if Kramer had made this stranger a factory worker? Would the audience still find it as easy to accept a mixed-race relationship? But there's no denying the drawing power of this movie, which gets most of its integrity from the stirring performances of Tracy and Hepburn. When the former (who had been so ill that the
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Stage Door Canteen (1943), directed by Frank Borzage (A Farewell to Arms) in support of the war effort, prefigures Anchors Aweigh and On the Town in depicting the lives of servicemen on leave in the big city. Countless British and American celebrities put in an appearance--everyone from Dame Judith Anderson to Katharine Hepburn, Count Basie to Benny Goodman. The story concerns three soldiers and the female volunteers they fall for at the canteen of the title--a real-life Manhattan nightspot--before shipping out for points unknown.
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