Shirley Temple's 1940 Magnum Opus, "The Blue Bird"

THE BLUE BIRD is a fascinating example of a Golden Age Hollywood train wreck, comparable to M-G-M's PARNELL (1937). Zanuck wanted to compete with THE WIZARD OF OZ, so he put his top moneymaking star, Shirley Temple, into a vehicle that was completely beyond her abilities. Although OZ was also a noted money loser in its initial release, THE BLUE BIRD occupies a special niche of its own.

Maeterlinck's early 1900's "fairy play" fantasy had many noteworthy stage productions, including The Moscow Art Theatre and Broadway,. It was made into an opera that was performed at the Met, and was filmed several times in the silent era. On paper, it seemed like an ideal vehicle to showcase Temple as a child in search of happiness. But the story itself was too rarefied and allegorical to translate well into film. Fox's screenplay did no favors to poor Shirley, casting her as a selfish and ill-tempered kid. With the exception of Gale Sondergaard as Myltyl the Cat, and Sybil Jason as the heroine's sickly friend, the secondary casting is uninspired. The Fairy Berylune is bumptious and cross, opposed to OZ's luminous Glinda. And the tutelary fairy, Light, is altogether bland and uninteresting as a character.

Like THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE BLUE BIRD begins in black and white and then turns into Technicolor. But the transition is abrupt and clumsily handled, unlike OZ's careful setup for Dorothy's entrance into the Land of Oz.

Temple's one moment to shine comes when she and her brother visit their deceased grandparents and she sings them a cute song. But then the grandparents return to their eternal rest, a very downbeat ending to the scene. Similarly, the episode with Mr. and Mrs. Luxury proves a harsh lesson for Shirley's character, but it doesn't do anything to uplift the audience or evoke their sympathy. The scene with the unborn children waiting to come to Earth is downright bizarre, though gorgeously photographed in Technicolor.

All in all, there aren't many opportunities for Shirley to show empathy or relate to the other characters, unlike Judy Garland's heartwarming performance in OZ. Temple doesn't have a supporting cast anywhere near as wonderful as that of OZ. And most critically, THE BLUE BIRD doesn't have a musical score on a par with Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's classic tunes for Oz. BUUE BURD has no tunes for the supporting cast, so everyone is just deadly earnest.

And Fox never learned its lesson, blowing another fortune on a disastrous 1976 remake, directed by George Cukor and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Cicely Tyson and Ava Gardner.

THE BLUE BIRD marked the end of Shirley Temple's reign at Fox, and pretty much the end of her film career. The film showed only too harshly the limitations of her talent. At the age of 12 she was a has-been.

I love this movie! It's a dark, twisted, sadistic version of "The Wizard of Oz" and feels like an acid trip.

She failed a few times over after that--at MGM and then had mostly lackluster efforts after the war. She also had the misfortune of marrying John Agar who later starred in tons of 50s sci-fi cheapies.

The Moscow Theatre’s production must have been fucking magnificent. The site I linked has photos of the costumes. They are mind-blowing.

It has one great sequence of a forest fire.

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