Aventura en Baltimore

It is beautifully filmed by Robert de Grasse. And Robert Young's character is appealing and even admirable. This seems like a dry run for his most famous role, the title character in "Father Knows Best." Here he is a father in two ways: He has children, including Shirley Temple. And he is an Episcopal priest (under consideration for Bishop of his Diocese.) Shirley Temple is the main character. She is meant to be saucy and ahead of her time. But she's very hard to like. The escapade in which her boyfriend, John Agar, borrows a speech from her for a debating contest isn't admirable. And right here, it's hard to imagine that a priest would laugh off his daughter's involvement in such dishonesty.

Then she paints Agar. She promises she will just use his body as a starting point -- no face. But the painting is exhibited in a show and everyone sees that she has painted him in a bathing suit. That would have been extremely risqué for 1905. What would be the equivalent 101 years later? Something on the Internet or in an X-rated video.

All this while her father is being considered for Bishop. I wonder what Christopher Isherwood's original story was like. Maybe she was a forerunner to Sally Bowles. Here, however, she is sullen, pampered, and selfish.

After a few successful teen-age roles (and a couple of ill-fated ones), Shirley's uneven career as a young lady was not helped by this routine romantic comedy of the early 1900s in which she plays a rebellious daughter of a minister (Robert Young) with shocking ideas about love. As a crusader for women's suffrage, Shirley seems more petulant than feisty, playing a girl who crusades for women's suffrage. Nice to see Robert Young in his pre-Father Knows Best days. The film has an attractive look with handsome photography and a good feel for the period atmosphere, but the script is too lightweight to carry much conviction. Pleasant enough if you want to see what Shirley Temple looked like at this stage in her career. She had three more "clinkers" to go before quitting the screen.

Her then-husband John Agar wasn't much help--here he comes across as a wooden actor, not well suited to comedy. Pleasant enough film, but just a trifle.

I totally agree with the first post! I never could understand why people didn't think she was a great actress as an adult too. She was terrific and I appreciate her enough to make up for all the fools who don't. She is my favorite actress ever. I'm so sorry she quit acting at such a young age. What we've missed because of it! I wish Shirley would get back into show business now even after all these years! After all she has accomplished in her life she deserves take it easy at this age but sorry, as a great fan, I want more Shirley even now! I hope she doesn't stay away because of feeling unappreciated, it would make me cry if she did. I can't help but make a comment on Shirley the child... It would have been enough just to look at her pretty face, beautiful hair, sweet giggly voice, infectious smile and dimples, but it's amazing that on top of all that, she was so smart, had more poise than most adults, could dance fantastic, sing, act, remember lines and lyrics (all simultaneously) It is still totally amazing to me. And watching her movies when I was a child, I couldn't appreciate how easy she made it all look. Now that I'm an adult who has raised my own child, I fully realize how extraordinary Shirley really was. I don't know HOW she did it. I know this sounds like a small thing, but even if you watch her hands ... how expressive they were. I love how she use to put on her mad face and stamp her little foot! Best of all the little Shirley makes me smile just watching her put on a big smile and she can also bring me to tears. How many other people can do that?

Mild sitcom, from a story by Christopher Isherwood of all people, about a pastor's rebellious daughter in the stuffy upper-middle-class Baltimore of 1905. Though it's handsomely photographed, there's no Baltimore atmosphere here; it could as easily be Milwaukee or St. Louis, and in fact, the strong-family-ties theme, aggressive nostalgia, boy-next-door puppy love, and sleeve-tugging sentimentality play like a less well-written "Meet Me in St. Louis." Robert Young, top-billed and with a mustache and silly hair, does a tolerable warmup for "Father Knows Best"; he furrows his brow a lot and makes pronouncements. (But the height of the plot arc, in which he delivers a give-'em-hell sermon to his hypocritical congregation, is unaccountably omitted from the script.) The only real surprise of the movie is how amazingly uninteresting a 21-year-old Shirley Temple is. She simpers, she searches for her key light to be never anything but as attractive as possible, she tries to convey adolescent feistiness, but her line readings are monotonously alike, and she has no inner life. Nor is it wise to pair her with then-husband John Agar, in what's essentially the Tom Drake role; he's as dull as Tom Drake. The script puts the two through some very contrived roadblocks on the road to love, including a hard-to-believe episode of her unintentionally instigating a riot, a harder-to-believe one of him reading a speech of hers out loud and forgetting to change the pronouns, and an unpalatable one of her lying to him about painting his portrait. I wouldn't even root for such a selfish young miss. RKO must have figured, well, she's Shirley Temple, the audience will be on her side no matter what. I wasn't, and while the denouement is rushed to the point of incoherence, I wasn't sorry to see this one end.

Shirley Temple was capable of turning in better performances than "Baltimore" as she transitioned to adulthood, but the script (a flashback to 1905?) and the other actors were not people she could play off well.

Just two years earlier, Temple had a major hit with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant in "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer". In this, the script was sharper and funnier. It was in the present day, focusing on Shirley's growth, and she had the dependable Myrna Loy to work off. Loy, while projecting a solid and comedic presence herself, always went out of her way to make sure the other actors were comfortable with her and with their role. In this case, when an agitated Temple kept showing up for work due to marriage difficulties, Loy sent her a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a heartfelt note, bonding the two actors for the rest of their lives.

Loy was the rock in every comedic group of actors she worked with. She went out of her way to allow the other actors to feel comfortable and do their best work, a proactive behavior she had learned when working with Clark Gable, Melvyn Douglas, Spencer Tracy, William Powell, Clifton Webb and numerous other co-stars.

Loy's steady and dependable acting allowed both Shirley and Cary Grant to be more expressive than the script indicates, making the movie a giant success and bringing Shirley's (adult) acting into the limelight once again. With this freedom, she could be herself and act. The result was a half million dollars for RKO and a runaway hit's publicity for Temple.

In "Baltimore" Shirley has no such attachments and no such freedom. There was no Myrna Loy to make her feel alive and open. The movie doesn't work well because there is little chemistry between the actors, even between Temple and her husband, John Agar, who did a good job with his role. A period piece was not something Temple needed. She was growing up and needed to be seen in the present day, as she was in "Bobbysoxer". Instead, and unfortunately, she is to go through several more scripts that do not fit her burgeoning character, and thus are movie flops, before finally calling it quits.

Shirley Temple had the acting skills to continue making movies, but she needed adult scripts and actors around her who were supportive, like Loy. It's a shame she hung up her shingle and simply quit. All she needed was the right "magic" around her.