Little Miss Marker (1934) on Netflix
A gambler leaves his daughter Marthy Jane with bookie Sorrowful Jones as collateral for a bet. The girl, called Marky, lands in the care of Sorrowful and singer Bangles Carson.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.9/101,635 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Plot summary
Big Steve Halloway, gambler and proprietor of a New York cabaret called the Horseshoe, needs money, so he arranges for his fellow bookies, among them Sorrowful Jones, to pay him a thousand dollars apiece for his racehorse Dream Prince to lose. At the betting window Sorrowful meets a gambler who has already lost five hundred dollars and cannot produce the twenty he wants to wager. The man leaves his young daughter, Marthy Jane, in Sorrowful's hands as security for the bet, a marker. Sorrowful, a bookie, is not pleased to have the child on his hands. Known as Marky, she comes under the care of Sorrowful and of Big Steve's girlfriend, singer Bangles Carson.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Little Miss Marker (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shirley Temple had already failed an audition for the role of Marky before her Fox contract, so her mother Gertrude arranged a secret second audition with director Alexander Hall; it worked, and Fox loaned her to Paramount at $1,000 a week.
- Little Miss Marker was the last film Dorothy Dell completed: she died in a car crash just seven days after the film's debut, and her co-star Shirley Temple took her death very hard.
- On the strength of the film's box-office success, Paramount offered Fox $50,000 for Shirley Temple's contract, and the offer was turned down.
- Dorothy Dell could not contain her laughter during the first take of the scene in which Shirley Temple refuses her food and says "I don't want no mush", so the scene had to be redone.
