Crazy about Kathleen. In 1941, Shirley Temple turned 13 years old, and you can imagine how studio bosses frantically searched for a project that could keep the public interested in the miracle child, gradually losing its childhood charm.
Kathleen is Shirley's only film to be released in '41, although in earlier times the number of feature films with her participation reached seven per year. Not all of them had such artistic value as, say, “Little Miss Marker” with Adolf Menjou or “Stowaway”, where the partner of the actress was Robert Young. Was not a masterpiece and “Kathleen” Harold S. Bouquet.
The name itself seems too old and strict for the mischievous tomboy girl, which we from old memory try to imagine the heroine Shirley. But this is not so significant compared to the main trouble of Kathleen - it is frankly secondary.
Actually, all the “children’s” Temple films are built on a single scheme, with small variations roaming from picture to picture. This scheme is widely known and it makes no sense to talk about it. The question is what “stuffing” is added to the finished “dough”. Because the end result turned out suspiciously similar to the pre-war picture of Dina Durbin “Mad of Music”.
The main heroine of both films is a teenage girl, a smart girl and a visionary, half orphan. She makes up the perfect parents she tells her high school friends about. “Kathleen”, however, saves on extras – the action takes place during the summer holidays, and we will not see any of the heroine’s peers, only an elderly “confident” from a nearby store. The place of the ridiculous Christian Rab, familiar to our viewers for the role of the driver in the “Big Waltz”, is occupied by the touching Felix Bressart and shaggy Rudy – the film is old, and the dog is “black as the soul of Azef” – that this is a poodle, one can only guess.
Directly from “Music Madness” passed a couple Herbert Marshall – Gail Patrick, with the only difference that in the picture of Norman Thorough Patrick played the mother of the girl, and in “Kathleen” she is a potential stepmother. Marshall from the invented father becomes a native.
And if in “Music Madness” the characters were discharged lively and realistically, then the characters of “Kathleen” look caricatured. The governess is a real creature of hell, and the bride of her father is so docile that it seems that molasses are about to flow from the screen.
The driving force of the plot, in my opinion, is absurd - a doctor is assigned to an absolutely healthy child. Thus, a love triangle arises – it is funny that Laraine Day, playing a beautiful doctor who has tender feelings for Marshall’s hero, was his on-screen daughter in Foreign Correspondent a year earlier.
I love Herbert Marshall very much, he is a wonderful actor with a great creative range. Even if we take only the paternal theme in his paintings of the late 30s and 40s, we can see how diverse and different the characters created by Marshall are. Richard Todd, a serious and businessman, is imbued with the elements of the game, and then really begins to experience parental feelings for the heroine of Dina Durbin (“Music madness”). Archibald Craven of The Secret Garden is bleak and intolerant; he bathes in his suffering, and his son is a reminder of his own grief. Against this background, the diffuse, hovering in the clouds character “Kathleen” looks as colorless as his name – John Davis.
Shirley Temple, for whom the picture was shot, causes sincere sympathy. Of course, a gifted girl is trying to squeeze into the once money-making clichés, not taking into account that these clichés are hopelessly outdated. Singing and dancing surrounded by brave hussars look frankly false number, and generally creates a feeling that the young actress feels “out of place”.
It is impossible not to admit, the charm of "Crazy for Music" is partly transferred to "Kathleen". This is why we appreciate it. However...
In the Soviet film “I Walk Through Moscow”, the question about Robertino Loretti was answered: he grew up. Nothing can be done, Shirley has grown.
7 out of 10