by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film was an independent production by James
Nasser from 1949 originally released as A Kiss for Corliss and later retitled Almost a Bride for legal reasons surrounding its origins as a
sequel to a 1944 film called Kiss and Tell. It’s mainly known as the last film ever made by Shirley Temple (her
imdb.com filmography lists a late-1950’s TV series she hosted called Shirley
Temple’s Storybook and a final appearance
as a guest star on Red Skelton’s TV show in 1963) before she retired from show
business at age 21. She and Deanna Durbin are my Exhibits A and B in my
contention that the only way a child star can have a rational, sane aduithood
is to get the hell out of show business altogether, though Temple said in her
autobiography Child Star that she
took that decision after she turned 21, legally became an adult, and found that
the trust fund that had supposedly collected her earnings as a child star had
been so systematically looted by her parents (despite the passage of “Coogan’s
Law” by the California legislature in the 1930’s that was supposed to keep that
from happening) she only had $10,000 left from a career that had literally
earned millions. The few movies Temple made as a teenager in the 1940’s reveal
a performer who wasn’t readily able to adapt to the challenges of playing adult
roles (as Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood would do), and casting directors
seemed thrown by her. A Kiss for Corliss is generally written off as an artistic disaster, but it turned out to
be a much better movie than its reputation, suffering from some of the problems
of teen movies then as now but mostly an agreeable light entertainment. It
begins with attorney Harry P. Archer (Tom Tully) arguing in court that the
defendant he’s going after is the most despicable character he’s ever
encountered in his career: “Seldom in my long career as an attorney have I ever
encountered a man who can claim no virtue. But I say to you, you have such a
man in your courtroom today. Cold-blooded and ruthless, unmoved by the pain he
has caused, Kenneth Marquis smugly sits there gloating.” At first we think
Kenneth Marquis (David Niven) must be a serial killer Archer is prosecuting,
but he turns out to be the defendant in a divorce case brought by his third
wife, whom Archer is representing. Archer’s daughter Corliss (Shirley Temple)
wants to watch her dad’s trial but he’s barred her —she tries an ineffectual
disguise to sneak into the courtroom but the bailiff recognizes her immediately
and bars her.
Corliss concocts a plot to make her age-peer boyfriend Dexter
Franklin (Darryl Hickman) jealous; with the help of her friend Mildred Pringle
(Virginia Welles — no relation) she concocts a phony diary suggesting that she
and Marquis are lovers and she’s headed for the altar to be his wife number
four. Only she gives it to another local kid, Raymond Pringle (Robert Ellis),
to be rebound in leather — and Raymond photostats the pages, leaks them to
Dexter — who publishes a small-scale paper of his own — and Dexter in turn
shows them to Marquis to wangle an ad out of him. Marquis, who was so offended
by Harry Archer’s victory in court (he won Marquis’ ex a $200,000 property
settlement) he’s been looking for ways to needle him and seized on the idea of
making it look like he’s dating Archer’s daughter as a good tactic to get under
Harry Archer’s skin. Corliss and Dexter actually spent a night together, albeit
a Production Code-licit one, when they tried to sneak into a gambling
establishment called the Penguin Club and got locked in its basement overnight
after they went there to hide out from a police raid on the place (engineered
by a citizens’ committee led by Harry Archer that was determined to close down
the club), but thanks to a whole lot of lying by the other characters Harry
Archer and his wife Janet (Gloria Holden, who never had the star career playing
the title role in the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter should have given her), everyone gets the impression
that that was when she spent the wild night with Kenneth Marquis described in
her diary. At one point Corliss tries to fake amnesia to try to convince her
parents she doesn’t remember That Night,
and Shirley Temple spends about a reel of the film acting like the
pre-pubescent Temple from a decade earlier — the one the world had fallen in
love with and made the biggest movie star of the 1930’s.
Marquis himself leaks
the diary to the mainstream press, a weekly magazine called Glimpse (i.e., Life) publishes the news that little Corliss Archer is about to become the
fourth Mrs. Kenneth Marquis, Corliss’s uncle George (Roy Roberts) — a Navy
chaplain — agrees to perform the ceremony despite his loathing for the groom —
only at the end everyone comes to their senses and Corliss ends up innocently
paired with Dexter while Kenneth ends up with a black eye (literally!) from
Corliss’s dad. Written by Howard Dimsdale with F. Hugh Herbert getting a
“characters created by” credit for having written Kiss and Tell, the film this was a sequel to (which is neatly
referred to here when Kenneth sends Corliss an ornate box with a nightgown,
each one embroidered with the day of the week on which she’s supposed to wear
it, though after we see five white nightgowns labeled “Monday” through “Friday”
the sixth drawer in the box contains a black nightgown embroidered “Kiss and Tell”), and directed
by Richard Wallace, A Kiss for Corliss turns out to be a quite droll comedy with a marvelous comic-villain
performance by David Niven, of whom we see surprisingly (and disappointingly)
little even though he’s second-billed. Temple is O.K. playing a trope that was
actually quite common in the 1940’s — a teenage girl cruising an older man in
an attempt to make her teenage boyfriend jealous — Jane Powell’s lumbering
(124-minute) MGM musical Holiday in Mexico had told much the same story, only in that one Powell was being raised
by a single father (Walter Pidgeon) and the older man was pianist José Iturbi
(playing himself!). But what came off as engaging precocity in the 1930’s when
Temple was actually a child just seems like annoying immaturity here, and one
can tell why Temple chose to make this her last film and get the hell out of
the business.
