Retrato de Ethel Hatch, com 9 anos, pelo Reverendo Charles Dodgson (1832-1898)"Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body"...Wee Willie Winkie
The owners of a child star are like leaseholders - their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonialsquabble? Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after "The Littlest Rebel"). In "Captain January" she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in "Wee Willie Winkie," wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square; hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised; watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. 'Why are you making Mummy cry?' - what could be purer than that? And the scene when dressed in a white nightdress she begs grandpa to take Mummy to a dance - what could be more virginal? On those lines her new picture, made by John Ford, who directed "The Informer," is horrifyingly competent. It isn't hard to stay to the last prattle and the last sob. The story - about an Afghan robber converted by "Wee Willie Winkie" to the British Raj - is a long way after Kipling. But we needn't be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood's is the better.
Graham Greene (1904-1991), "Wee Willie Winkie", Night and Day, 28 October 1937Cartaz para Wee Willie Winkie (1937), de John FordLINHA ALERTA INTERNETA SEGURA: chamem a políciaEtiquetas: Cinema, Disobedience, Dodgson, foda-se caralho, Graham Green, John Ford, José Sócrates, Literature, Mass Media, pedophilia, politically correct, Sexuality, Shirley Temple