Brats and Perfect People

All right, maybe the little cutup over there in the corner will never be Roddy McDowall in How Green Was My Valley. And maybe the princess maneuvering her Barbies around the doll house will never be Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet or Jean Simmons making her way through Great Expectations and Olivier's Hamlet with certainty and erotic grace. But to one degree or another, most kids--even yours--are actors anyway. Before a camera, most could be great if they did not learn, for whatever reasons of self-defense, to be cute and lovable. They turn into the celluloid brats who curdled their way through most Hollywood films of the '30s and '40s. Small wonder it always seemed so meet and funny when the toe of W.C. Fields' brogue met the back of Baby LeRoy's diaper.

Fields was using Baby LeRoy's posterior to administer a blunt point of protest about the prevailing school of American movie acting, juvenile division. Chaplin had done his best to counter cuteness and establish a kind of enhanced naturalism when he cast Jackie Coogan in The Kid in 1920.

Coogan had no guile in him and a heart as wide as a boulevard. When Coogan is forcibly separated from the Tramp, his adoptive father, his cries of desperation can be heard plainly even in this silent film.

With few exceptions, like the children in King Vidor's The Crowd, and Jackie Cooper in Vidor's The Champ, kids in those days were usually required to unbottle buckets of maple syrup. Think about the death of Rhett Butler's be loved Bonnie Blue in Gone With the Wind. The little actress, Cammie King, is such a vision of hatefulness in her taffeta gowns, ringlets that curl like maypoles and a voice full of squiggles, that one feels less sympathy at her demise than at the death of her pony. The animal is shot for throwing her, but ascends to equine heaven with the prayers and thanks of a grateful audience.

It took a fair amount of brass and something like genius to transcend these limitations. Judy Garland in Wizard of Oz and Mickey Rooney in Boys' Town did it by the sheer force of their gift. But to ward the close of World War II, styles changed.

Child actors started to carry their share of the weight of heightened political and social reality. "I think it is the most hopeful business of movies to find the perfect people rather than the perfect artists," wrote James Agee in a review of National Velvet that was like a prose sonnet to the young Elizabeth Taylor.

Hardly a month before, Margaret O'Brien had appeared in Meet Me in St. Louis, contributing a turn that combined show-biz razzle-dazzle and pulverizing emotional honesty. Her Halloween night walk down to the dark end of the street, toward an old house that loomed before her with the architecture of every childhood nightmare and the threat of every young uncertainty, was as scary and as true as movie acting ever gets.

O'Brien was a figure of unintentional transition. After the war directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica took kids right off the streets of Rome. In England, Director Carol Reed put Bobby Henrey in Graham Greene's exacting psychological study, The Fallen Idol, which was about the abrupt and shattering end of childhood.

American film makers, slicker and warier, searched for directness in youngsters who also had good looks. Natalie Wood, in Miracle on 34th Street, was artlessly worldly. Dean Stockwell, almost romantically handsome, gave a performance of fearless vulnerability in Down to the Sea in Ships. Stockwell had much in common with Roddy McDowall, who earlier in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley had been one of the first young actors to combine sensitivity and uncertainty without losing the basic strength of childhood. They both anticipated the dreaminess and longing of Brandon De Wilde in Shane as the kid for whom the gunfighter on a horse became a white knight.

Lately, no one has used children so well, or so lovingly, as Franc,ois Truffaut. Jean-Pierre Leaud--one of Agee's "perfect people"--found the full range of adolescent feeling in The 400 Blows. The roots of the performance could be traced to Jean Vigo, whose Zero for Conduct (1933), made with no professional kids, is still the screen's greatest poem to youthful anarchy. The 400 Blows exerted a strong influence on George Roy Hill, who in 1964 made The World of Henry Orient, which is about two lovesick Manhattan schoolgirls. As Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker scrambled across the city, energized but unaffected, they seemed all that could be hoped for in actors of any age.

Meanwhile, there were intimations of dark things from abroad. Lord of the Flies featured an island full of shipwrecked kids enacting a parable of original sin, and Our Mother's House was populated by a family of true charmers who kept their dead mother's body in the garden.

The Exorcist stirred the black undercurrents of movies like these into a raging tide of levitating beds and spinning heads. Through all this, Linda Blair remained determinedly professional. The boomlet of satanic kiddie movies like The Omen has not entirely receded. Consequently, there has been a small reaction back toward the Shirley Temple style. Quinn Cummings' appearances in The Goodbye Girl and TV's Family stir memories of dear Bonnie Blue.

One sign of hope: casting a new version of Little Miss Marker, Director Walter Bernstein resolved to find someone fresh and preferably nonprofessional for the role that made Shirley Temple famous. He found Sara Stimson, 6, at an open casting call. She had never acted before. And she could be anyone's daughter, even yours.

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