First impression: Shirley Temple is...
Shirley Temple is an awful actress!
shareIt wasn't just that she was a terrible actress, it was that she was doing her schtick from her children's movies. It was cute when she was little. It was getting less cute as she became older and retirement loomed in.
As a teen, it was ridiculous and annoying. Some women must have evidently used that type of simpering little girl act in real life and some men fell for it, but no way could it have been normal teen behavior in that time of the late 40s.
I am surprised that there weren't more comments on this. I think her role was the one really false note in this fun comedy. She was like finger nails on a blackboard to me!
Yeah, it was a bit of a distraction. It always is when you notice someone trying to fill a role, and only semi-successfully.
Obviously, they were playing off her enormous popularity. But as you note, the cutesy little girl act didn't quite come off as genuine. Shirley was in over her head among some very heavy weight actors of the day.
Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. H.L. Mencken
I am hardly a Shirley Temple fan. The great great western Fort Apache, with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, a great supporting cast, and directed by John Ford - all the makings of a ten for ten in my book - got taken down to a nine solely due to her (in that film) odious presence. For example.
But... here I did not find her the negative presence she was in at least some of her other films. I think that is surprising, since an obvious explanation might have been that she was older in The Bachelor. Age taking off her rough edges maybe? But no, in fact Fort Apache was hte more recently made film. She in fact was younger here than in FA.
I think you have to give her some credit for making her character less obnoxious than she could have quite easily been. As written the character would have most easily been made plausible if played as a spoiled brat. Instead Ms. Temple mixed in some niceness, some thoughtfulness, in with the immaturity, and somehow it came off as no less plausible than a purely obnoxious portrayal might have been.
In fact my main problem with the film was how the characters were written. The performances were all quite good to excellent.