“The Little Colonel”, Shirley Temple, Bill Robinson: Black History Month in Dance, 2021

Black History Month in Dance 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172. “The Little Colonel” (Fox, 1935) is strikingly and intensely about the American South in the 1870s, with feelings still strong for those characters who remember the Civil War and the South’s defeat. Today, I would hope that anyone’s feelings about its depiction of black servants and “piccaninny” children would go on changing and changing again during the course of the movie. (The word “piccaninnies” is used.)

It’s a comedy: which sometimes defuses and heals some of the most potentially incendiary moments, but sometimes, to a modern audience, makes them only more inflammatory. We’re not three minutes into the film when the white patriarch Lionel Barrymore tells his old black retainer Bill Robinson “If you’d broken that <a vase>, I’d have broken your head.” (Later on, Barrymore breaks the vase himself in one of his fits of temper.)

The film’s most famous sequence is the staircase tap dance that Bill Robinson (as the black butler working for Shirley Temple’s grandfather, Lionel Barrymore) teaches little Temple. So it’s shocking to see that, in the closing credits, she’s billed first and he fourteenth; and that the main black actors are listed 10-14, while the white (several of whom do the most creakily dated acting in the movie) actors are billed at 1-9.

Yet your feelings change yet again when you learn that the staircase dance had to be cut from editions of the film that played in the South: it showed white Shirley Temple holding hands with black Bill Robinson. American race problems went very deep.

The staircase dance is a successful exercise in adorability for both participants. I particularly love that they do the first half with their backs to the camera.

Temple, of course, picks up Robinson’s steps immediately. The point, however, isn’t that white people pick up black steps without trouble - it’s that Shirley Temple is one special child, who solves all problems, more by heart than by brains. (By the end of the movie, she has run through dangerous terrain to find her grandfather when her parents are being held at gunpoint, healed the painful longterm breach between her grandfather and mother, helped to place the baddies in jail, and saved her parents from financial ruin. To such a wunderkind, it may not be so big a deal to pick up some dance steps.)

Robinson really did teach Temple her steps for the movie. And it’s interesting that she’s at her freshest and sweetest with him. (She has some insufferably synthetic moments elsewhere, but we can blame them on the director, David Butler, who gives them closeups.) Robinson and McDaniel play an old cartoon kind of black character that became controversial even in the 1930s: the Uncle Tom kind of excessively servile African American, a type far rarer today than eighty years ago.

Robinson was in his late fifties here, but his taps still have effortlessly clean attack. Temple’s taps were surely heavily dubbed: she does the steps, but her delivery looks less sharp than it is made to sound. Still, she shows the same winning manners to Robinson as she does to Barrymore. Elsewhere, the film’s treatment of its black servants is more condescending than that of “Gone with the Wind” (1939) - Hattie McDaniel and Bill Robinson, as the foremost black servants, are given a exchange about spelling, the comic point of which is that they can’t spell - and yet all the black characters have a vitality that makes them much nearer the film’s heart than the largely stuffed-shirted acting of its white characters.

Robinson and Temple have a second tap dance in the movie, a Q&A routine in the stables: he should be getting on with errands, but he just can’t resist waiting, because he needs to show Temple some new steps. Two black children - surely the most unaffectedly lovable characters in the film - strike up with mouth-organ music, and Temple immediately picks up the steps. It’s a very endearing scene. Eighty-four years on, how many duets have there been in popular or high-art entertainment that show a black person and a white person dancing together with equality, mutual respect, and evident affection? Some; too few.

Friday 26 February