The two-part documentary When We Were Young (1989) takes a nostalgic stroll through the films of Hollywood's greatest child stars. Covering every cute kid from the silent-era Baby Peggy through TV's the Beaver, the retrospective plays like a social history of the U.S. It's all here - the early child stars who kept the country smiling through the depression to the children of the '40s who provided hope in wartime to the 1950's sitcom kids who prepared us for all the foibles of parenthood. The opening credits alone make When We Were Young worth a look.

The beginning of the documentary features Judy Garland singing "You Made Me Love You" from Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) over a montage of movie youngsters. That's just a sample of the film clips to follow (many of them complete scenes rather than short clips) and it's liable to make even the toughest cynic feel nostalgic.

Maureen Stapleton narrates the documentary which first introduces the children of the silent pictures. In those years many adult actors portrayed children on screen including the Gish sisters and Mary Pickford who "played a girl until she bobbed her hair at 35." When We Were Young describes how the depression created the child star phenomenon. It shows why parents brought their children to Hollywood and how one working child actor could feed the entire family. The first real child star, according to the documentary, was Jackie Coogan, best known for his role in Chaplin's The Kid (1921). Also starting out in silents was Hal Roach's "Our Gang" which gets ample coverage (including a lovely serenade by Alfalfa) in the documentary. The first child star of the talkies, Jackie Cooper, breaks hearts in a clip from Skippy (1931) and shines opposite Wallace Beery in The Champ (1931). Cooper would be the first child nominated for an Oscar® for his work in Skippy.

Other kids from Hollywood's golden era featured in When We Were Young include: Dickie Moore, who appears with Marlene Dietrich in a clip from Blonde Venus (1932); Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland strut their stuff together in scenes from Babes on Broadway (1941), and separately in Boys Town (1938) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Of course, there's perennial favorite Shirley Temple singing and tapping her way through Little Miss Marker (1934) and The Little Colonel (1935); Jane Withers playing naughty to Shirley Temple's nice in Bright Eyes (1934); Freddie Bartholomew, fresh from the London stage, holds his own opposite Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous (1937); and the ever-adorable Margaret O'Brien warms hearts and wrings tears in Journey For Margaret (1942) and Meet Me in St. Louis(1944).

The documentary also includes interviews with many of the child stars as adults. Jackie Cooper reveals how his Oscar®-nominated tears in Skippy weren't just great acting. Apparently, when he couldn't cry on cue, the crew took his canine co-star behind a truck and pretended to shoot the pup. Cooper says he cried for two days. The move resulted not only in Cooper's Oscar® nomination, but also an Oscar® win for the film's director, and Cooper's uncle, Norman Taurog. Another admission comes from Little Rascal Spanky McFarland who confesses that he was five or six years old before he realized that all children weren't in the movies. And in a funny moment, Jane Withers reminisces about her audition for Bright Eyes where she had to imitate a machine gun.

Part two of When We Were Young moves through the war years and into the 1950s beginning with Darryl Hickman and Spencer Tracy in Keeper of the Flame (1942). Next up, Roddy McDowall wows audiences in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Lassie Come Home (1943). There's also a section on child stars and animals with Claude Jarman, Jr. in The Yearling (1946) and Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944). Representing the post-war kids are Dean Stockwell in The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and a very young Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

The documentary then shifts its focus to television, where every sitcom family seemed to require at least two adorable tykes. Familiar faces include Tom Rettig from the Lassie series, Angela Cartwright from Make Room For Daddy and Ron Howard on The Andy Griffith Show. Unfortunately, while TV created a new vehicle for child actors, it also signaled the end of the era of big screen child stars. As When We Were Young explains, the rising competition of TV coupled with the decline of the studio system, meant that studios could no longer foster the careers of child stars. The one exception being Disney, who with Hayley Mills in the '60s, enjoyed a string of box office hits such as Pollyanna (1960) and The Parent Trap (1961).

Several additional interviews round out the documentary and some of the more interesting comments come from Margaret O'Brien, who feels that the girls seemed to enjoy the stardom far more than the boys. Roddy McDowall's Hollywood experience was probably representative of the difficulties facing most juvenile leads; he jokes that he loved being a child star but the hard part was finding out at 17 or 18 that "you weren't the baby Jesus."

Producer: James Arntz, Shelley Spencer, Glenn DuBose
Director: Dick Carter
Screenplay: James Arntz, Katherine MacMillan
Film Editing: Don DeMartini
Cast: Maureen Stapleton (host), Jackie Cooper, Mickey Rooney, Spanky McFarland, Jane Withers, Roddy McDowall, Margaret O'Brien.
BW&C-96m. Closed captioning.

by Stephanie Thames