The Little Colonel

After the marriage of her yankee father (John Lodge) and rebel mom in the 1870’s we leap forward to introduce the star, (Shirley Temple as young Lloyd Sherman, in the year she turned 7) at a U.S. Army outpost where Robert Warwick oversees her honorary investiture, in Fox Films’ The Little Colonel, 1935.

Shirley Temple as young Lloyd has conspired with servants Hattie McDaniel and Bill Robinson to assume a dress and bonnet that belonged to her mother, and advances her scheme to soften up her grouchy ex-Confederate grandfather the colonel (Lionel Barrymore), in The Little Colonel, 1935.

After a mild opening scene establishing Kentucky “in the 70’s,” just about the whole premise, Elizabeth (Evelyn Venable) aided by Hattie McDaniel wants to elope with yankee Jack (John Lodge) who seems decent but her grandfather the colonel (Lionel Barrymore) doesn’t care, in Shirley Temple’s first film with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, The Little Colonel, 1935.

Widely remarked upon especially decades later, the first inter-racial dancing couple in a Hollywood film, and Shirley Temple’s first number with her great friend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, featuring the stair-dancing for which he nearly won a legal patent, The Little Colonel, 1935.