From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Blue Bird is a 1940 film starring Shirley Temple., based on a classic play by Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Intended as Twentieth Century-Fox's answer to The Wizard of Oz, which had been released the previous year, it was filmed in Technicolor and directed by Walter Lang. The film failed at the box office, but has found a cult following among Temple fans since its television airings of the 1960s and 70s and its reissue on video.
[edit] Synopsis
Mytyl (Shirley Temple), the bratty daughter of a woodcutter, finds a unique bird in the Royal Forest and selfishly refuses to give it to her sick friend. That night she is visited in a dream by a fairy named Berylune who sends her and her brother Tytyl to search for the Blue Bird of Happiness. To accompany them, the fairy magically transforms their dog Tylo, cat Tylette (played by Gale Sondergaard), and lantern ("Light") (played by Helen Ericson) into human form. The children have a number of adventures including a visit with their (deceased) grandparents in the Land of the Past, a stay in The Land of Luxury, an attack by Old Man Oak (Zeus) with his angry trees and lightning which results in a forest fire, a meeting with Father Time, and, in the Land of Tomorrow, populated by unborn children, a meeting with Abraham Lincoln as a young boy (he prophesies "they will kill me"), and a meeting with their future sister. The scene in the Land of Tomorrow is an unusually somber one to find in a Shirley Temple film. The dream journey makes the previously unhappy and selfish Mytyl awake as a kinder and gentler girl who has learned to appreciate all the comforts and joys of her home and family. Much like MGM's The Wizard of Oz, the story starts in sepia and changes to Technicolor for the magical dream sequence.
[edit] Characters
[edit] Trivia
- Originally cast as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, Gale Sondergaard was replaced by Margaret Hamilton when MGM decided to change the Wicked Witch from a glamorous character to an ugly one, and Sondergaard refused to wear the necessary disfiguring makeup.
- In The Blue Bird, Shirley Temple sings just one song titled "Lady O" in a scene at her grandparents' cottage.
- Shirley had been considered for the role of Dorothy Gale in MGM's The Wizard of Oz a year earlier, but her modest singing talent and contractual obligations to Fox Studios prevented her from getting the part.
- The Blue Bird was Shirley Temple's first box-office flop in her 6 years of films. Audiences disliked the idea of Shirley as a nasty character needing to learn a lesson.
- This was to be Shirley Temple's last child role. Her next and last role for 20th Century Fox at age 12 was as a pre-teen vaudevillian in Young People (with film clips from Temple's earlier films used for flashback scenes).
- Sybil Jason (Warner Bros' first child star) said in her autobiography My Fifteen Minutes that her role as (sympathetic) sick girl Angela was significantly edited down after protest from Shirley Temple's mother.
- The original Maeterlinck play of The Blue Bird was published in 1908 and first filmed in 1910.
- While many of Temple's films show her character misbehaving in various ways, this is the only to show her being truly punished. Early in the film, her brattiness earns her a spanking.
[edit] External links
 American films of the 1940s |
|
|
|
|
