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Plot summary
Heidi is eight years old and orphaned when her aunt Dete brings her to a cabin in the mountains and leaves her with Adolph Kramer, the girl's grandfather, who has lived there alone for years and does not welcome the company. Heidi's cheerful manner slowly draws him out, and he opens up to the village below. Then Dete returns and carries the child off to Frankfurt am Main, where the wealthy Sesemann family wants a companion for Klara, a sheltered girl in a wheelchair. The household's strict housekeeper, Fraulein Rottenmeier, watches over Klara, and Heidi is unhappy and homesick. Before the pair leave the mountain, the pastor learns where Heidi is being taken and passes the news to Adolph, who sets out after his granddaughter.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Heidi (1937)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the scene where Temple’s character gets butted by the goat, she initially did it herself while completely padded up, but after a few takes her mother insisted a double be used; one of the extras, a boy, was dressed up to look like her, and his father was so upset that he prohibited him from ever acting again.
- On set, Temple ran an informal club she had invented in 1935 called the Shirley Temple Police Force, complete with badges; everyone who joined swore obedience to "Chief" Temple, who took to ordering the crew around with lines like "Take that set down and build me a castle."
- Temple also had trouble milking the goat, so Dwan had a flexible piece of tubing installed in such a way as to make it look as if the goat was being milked.
- There were reports that Temple was behind the dream sequence and was enthusiastically pushing for it, but in her autobiography she vehemently denied this: her contract gave neither her nor her parents any creative control over the films she was in.
