The New Pictures

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Twentieth Century-Fox).

Few cinemoppets would be capable of bringing to life the character, imagination and enterprise of Kate Douglas Wiggin's calico-&-pigtails heroine. Smirking, preciously gifted, 9-year-old Shirley Temple is not one of the few. In print, spunky, romancy Rebecca sold soap orders, wrote soaring rhymes, brought a whiff of fresh air into a stuffy New England scene. To the cinema version, warped to suit her rapidly narrowing talents, Shirley brings her dimples, a few precocious songs, two tap dances, and cements three adult romances--two over par, even for Shirley.

Approaching the awkward age, Shirley is not quite so dewy as she used to be. Paced by the dark veteran, Bill Robinson, through two simple tap routines, one to a pleasing tune called Toy Trumpet, she seems something more than a doll, something less than a little girl. Her singing, almost free now of the lilting lisp that has three times made her No. 1 Oh-&-Ah cinema champion (TIME, Jan. 3), sounds much like that of any little Sunday-morning radio aspirant.

When Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm opens in a satiny broadcasting studio, surviving members of the common-drinking-cup generation may get something of a wrench. And when Shirley tells them, with well-rehearsed and gleefully interpolated chuckles,' that

"In raggy britches there's a lot of riches

On which you don't pay any income tax,"

they will see that this Rebecca is a $2,400-a-week Hollywood specialist with no mortgage to pay off, no mean Minnie Smellie to complicate her life, no need at all for a Mr. Aladdin to make her dreams come true.

Generals Without Buttons (Forrester-Parant), a French film, has all the suave savvy of the French. Its Gallic point: that the things boys do are no more absurd than the things men do, especially in love & war. With the polished simplicity of a parable, the frugal neatness of good homespun, and a cast of eager, fresh child actors, Generals Without Buttons retells in cinema the gently satirical story that young French Author Louis Pergaud told in La Guerre des Boutons, shortly before he went to his death at Verdun in 1915.

For its grapes, the village of Velrans likes sunlight; for its cabbages, the adjoining village of Longeverne likes rain. One day, centuries back, the peasant folk of the two villages set out for the same shrine to pray for their respective needs. Brisk words led to a brisk battle, and the prayers went unsaid. The feud is still being fought by 20th-century youngsters, even though the blonde schoolteacher (Claude May) at Velrans and the handsome mayor of Longeverne (Jean Murat) are more than willing to set an example in neighborly love. In the children's war, the most telling blow is to snip off all a captive's buttons, send him home holding up his pants. One strategist discovers that the way to fix that is to fight without clothes until a war chest of replacement buttons can be accumulated. The children discover what an angry futility war is. Director Daroy discovers the French way to end such a story: a chance remark about the weather turns an inter-village love feast into a neat and retroactive grown-up rumpus.

Director Daroy's film, made on location, with the splendid Jurassic hills and quaint villages of southern France for background, was obviously inexpensive. That fact offers no lesson that Hollywood, geared as it is to mass production, is likely to learn. But what Hollywood might learn from Director Daroy is that child actors are at their best when they are acting like children.

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