Glad Rags to Riches (1933)

Director:

Charles Lamont

Release Date:

5 February 1933 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Short

Plot:

A girl has to decide who to marry: a poor country boy or a rich nightclub owner. |

Plot Keywords:

Diaper

Cast

Eugene Butler	...	Nightclub Owner
Lawrence Harris	...	Policeman
Georgie Smith	...	Elmer
Shirley Temple	...	Nell / La Belle Diaperina
Marilyn Granas	...	The Maid (uncredited)

Directed by
Charles Lamont

Produced by
Jack Hays	....	producer

Music Department
Irving Bibo	....	composer: stock music (uncredited)

Production Companies

• Jack Hays Productions

Distributors

• Educational Film Exchanges (1933) (USA) (theatrical)
• A-1 Video (????) (USA) (DVD)
• Grapevine Video (????) (USA) (VHS)
• Mill Creek Entertainment (2011) (USA) (DVD)
• Passport Video (2007) (USA) (DVD)

Runtime:

UK:10 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Jack Hays Productions

Trivia:

Third entry in the Baby Burlesk one-reel comedy series.

Quotes:

Nell:[singing] 'Tis sad when you think of her wasted life, for youth cannot mate with age. / Her beauty was sold, for an old man's gold. She's a bird in a guilded cage.

Soundtrack:

A Bird in a Gilded Cage

Proof that folks in the 1930s were probably insane.

Although I will readily acknowledge that Shirley Temple was an amazing child actress (probably the best ever), her early short films were, for the most part, god-awful. Imagine a series of short comedies (?) where THE joke was seeing toddlers behaving like adults. So, you see 2 and 3 and 4 year-olds acting like it's a romantic film and spouting drivel and dressing VERY inappropriately--that's what these films from Educational Films were like. Today, I assume most who see them will be creeped out--especially because you can't help but think that pedophiles loved the films! As for everyone else, I can only assume that mental illness was running rampant in 1933--elsewise, why would they have made films like "Glad Rags to Riches"?! This film once again finds Shirley as a vamp (uggh!). She is fought over by little boys and allures them with her exotic singing and dancing. For me, seeing a long row of chorus girls (age about 3 each) made me want to rinse out my eyes with Clorox! Creepy and dumb. And, difficult to watch without captions, as these WERE very little kids who had difficulty uttering their lines intelligibly.