The Hills Are Alive

Watching Shirley Temple in Heidi (1937) last night was the ultimate comfort-drug. It’s almost embarrassing to admit to a fondness for Temple considering our contemporary scorn for unironic, non-Takashi Murakami cuteness and cloying children. Author Graham Greene's apprehension about what Temple "means" still lingers. In a 1937 film review for Night and Day magazine, of Wee Willie Winkie, Greene implied a pedophiliac appeal to the half-pint minx, "Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."

While I can certainly see Greene’s point - anyone who has caught one of the lurid “Baby Burlesques” short films with their racist and sexual suggestiveness and pouting tots in diapers may feel a bit tainted by the experience - to me Temple is a sublime, albeit fantastic icon of childhood. She represents the magical potential of children to heal rifts, bring people together, melt hearts and engage enthusiastically and wholeheartedly with the world. Corny perhaps, but when the current notion of childhood is depraved or nonexistent and children are either seen as some expensive hobby for “breeders” or a sexualized, marketable commodity, I cling to even the mirage of innocence Temple represents (with full knowledge that in her age, she was a marketable commodity too). Maybe it’s because I loved Johanna Spyri’s book so much as a child, or maybe it’s that I spent some of my formative childhood years in Germany. But the film strokes some primitive pleasure receptors in my brain. The way Heidi rejects the Frankfurt high life to go live with her crusty, self-reliant grandfather in the mountains - that stomach-clutching homesickness - gets me every time. The cozy, snow globe comfort of the Alpine village where Heidi and “the grandfather” live is utterly intoxicating too: I want to go there, milk goats, make my own cheese, sleep in a hay loft. I kept thinking of Leni Riefenstahl watching the film, and the Bavarian fetish for the mountains, fresh air, good health. The fascists obviously ran with that one, but Heidi’s thirst for nature seems more related to that blissful, enchanted state of childhood, when your connection to the earth is so fervid and strong.

Like so many childhood heroines of film and literature, Heidi is an orphan, which increases the poignancy factor. But her grandfather (Jean Hersholt) tugs at my heartstrings too. What misanthrope can’t relate to an idyllic exile in the mountains, and the joy that even one tiny, vivacious companion might bring? The community Heidi so desperately longs for is tiny - the goat herd Peter, his blind grandmother, the village chaplain - but the simplicity of her ambition is supremely childlike. In Heidi Temple exercises an almost divine ability to charm cranky men and make crippled girls walk. Childhood is, indeed, magical and Heidi epitomizes that fact.