There, she makes friends with next-door neighbor Ram Dass (Cesar Romero), the soft-spoken but kindly servant of crotchety Miles Mander. Mander's estranged son, Richard Greene, is the riding master of the school, but his real purpose there is to romance Anita Louise, the school's hottie teacher. Of course, Greene and the ever-gracious Louise are also friends with perky Shirley Temple, as is good-natured Arthur Treacher, another teacher at the school and a former Vaudeville performer. Yet another friend is Sybil Jason, the school's sweet servant girl.
But Temple does not seem to make any friends among her fellow students. In particular, bratty older girl Marcia Mae Jones is jealous of the respect shown to Temple by the fiscally motivated Mary Nash.
Temple is the pride of the school as long as her generous father's checks are good. But he is declared dead, and because it is a movie, his assets have vaporized, seized by the Boers. Temple is now an orphan, and penniless at that. The unsympathetic and humorless Nash forces her into a Cinderella-type servant to the students. Things look bleak for Temple, but it is a movie, and a happy ending is in store.
How others will see it. There are still people who watch Shirley Temple movies, and not all of them are old enough to have voted for Eisenhower. A majority are women, since some men would consider a Shirley Temple vehicle as strictly for entertaining a pre-adolescent girl who has just arrived from 1940 via a time machine. That is, it isn't for males of any age, or for females over the age of 15, or for anyone who has access to a modern movie, such as the 1995 remake, which is, after all, a great film in its own right.
Fortunately, people do exist who can look beyond cultural gender restrictions, and can regard The Little Princess as an A-list technicolor movie from the sunset of Shirley Temple's reign as Hollywood biggest little star. 1939 was indeed the turning point of her career; Judy Garland's vocal talent proved superior in The Wizard of Oz and even Babes in Arms, and without the cutesy mannerisms that became increasingly out of place as Temple matured.
At the time of its release, The Little Princess was lost in a sea of heralded movies. 1939 is often regarded as Hollywood's best year, and that belief was practically universal prior to the 1960s. Ignored by the Academy Awards and absent from the Top 20 box office hits from that year, it was nonetheless a financial success compared to the flop The Blue Bird (1940), which threw a wrench in Temple's career as a female lead.
Modern audiences tend to favor the 1995 movie A Little Princess, which starred beautiful real-life rich girl Liesel Matthews, and more importantly was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, generally considered one of the best directors from Mexico.
At imdb.com, The Little Princess manages only 4K user votes and has a less than stellar user rating of 7.3 out of 10. Women grade it considerably higher, 7.6 versus 7.0 for men, since they can enjoy the movie without feeling like they should be watching The Dark Knight instead.
How I felt about it. It is impossible not to compare The Little Princess with A Little Princess, made more than fifty years later. Since I like both films nearly equally, I will say that that the former has the better Cockney dance numbers (all two of them) and the latter has the better fantasy scenes (the Indian servant has unexpected powers in the remake).
Really, The Little Princess is a play in two acts. In Act One, Temple is the perky rich girl. Act Two is much darker, and Temple learns how the other half (more accurately, the other 80%) lives. Her friendship with Becky is unchanged by their new status as peers. But the grown kitchen maids are almost as mean as villainous Mary Nash.
If The Little Princess is much better than it should be, credit would normally be given to the star, Shirley Temple, or the less heralded director, Walter Lang. But my heroes are the screenwriters, credited as Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris.