Captain January (1936) on Netflix
Star, eight, lives in a Maine lighthouse with Captain January, the keeper who rescued her from the sea. A truant officer questions her schooling, and the widow Eliza Croft courts him.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.0/101,665 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Trailer
Plot summary
Captain January keeps the lighthouse at Cape Tempest, Maine, where he has raised Star since rescuing her from the sea. His friends Captain Nazro and Paul Roberts, a mariner, help him care for the girl, and the widow Eliza Croft has been trying to win the captain's affection. Truant officer Agatha Morgan decides Star's home schooling is inadequate and has her tested and admitted to the third grade. Nazro then learns that every lighthouse will be automated by the end of the month, which would leave January without a post or the means to keep Star.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Captain January (1936)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For a scene in Captain January, a live crane was brought in but kept pecking at Shirley Temple's eyes, so nails were driven through the webbing of its feet to anchor it to the ground. The 4-ft-tall bird was brought from Florida by a bird fancier.
- The Codfish Ball sequence used real lobsters as props, but they were deemed potentially hazardous, so they were cooked and repainted their natural red color, one of two animal rights abuses on the set.
- In a scene with Buddy Ebsen near the water, Shirley Temple was originally bare-chested, but complaints from a woman's organization led to the scene being remade with her wearing a top.
- While burlesquing the sextette from Lucia with Guy Kibbee and Slim Summerville, Shirley Temple could not reach the high notes and ad-libbed "it's too high, too high" in time with the music; director David Butler accepted the take unchanged.
- Captain January was the first film shot on the new sound stage that 20th Century Fox dedicated to Will Rogers in 1935.
- Shirley Temple learned her multiplication tables while doing the tap dance sequence down the spiral staircase in the 1936 film Captain January.
