This movie was made in 1935. It's amazing how progressive its messages are. Lionel Barrymore is wooden in his role as Temple's grandfather, and the plot is beyond lame; but Shirley Temple still is fully convincing as Lloyd Sherman--a precocious, color-blind, and happiness-inducing five- year-old child of the 1870s. Hattie McDaniel, Bill Robinson, and Avonne Jackson are amazing in their rapport with Temple. There are some pretty clever lines that are really, really funny--many of them about ignorance, stubbornness, and prejudice. This movie is crying out loud for the attention of a rhetorician or a cultural studies theorist!
Review of The Little Colonel
