A Male Shirley Temple?

The Courtship of Eddie's Father. A young man named Ronny Howard is Hollywood's latest heartthrob, but to look at him you'd never know it. His hair is the color of iodine. His teeth are separated by gaps he can push a pea through. His face is so heavily freckled his eyes can be located only when he blinks. Furthermore, he stands a mere 5 ft. 1 in., weighs less than 70 Ibs., and talks in a squeaky little voice that sounds as if it came from a nine-year-old boy. It does. It comes from a nine-year-old boy so charming, cuddly, cunning, cute and competent that sometime this year, if he can manage not to grow a long red beard, he will probably become the most successful kid star of the era: a male Shirley Temple.

Ronny hit the big time in the picture business in the 1962 film version of The Music Man, has now been signed to star in a string of multimillion-dollar movies. Courtship, adapted from a slick novelette by Mark Toby and expertly directed by Vincente Minnelli, is the first of these. On the whole, it is just another sentimental comedy of the standard Hollywood brand. But at moments the sentiment warms to pathos, at others the pathos breaks up in belly laughs; and in all these moments Ronny is the live wire that sparks the show.

He plays a six-year-old whose mother has just died. The boy has an original mind ("Brave boys don't bleed very much when they're cut. No matter how big the cut is, they hold their blood in"), and he tries hard to understand what has happened to his mother. But he can't quite do it till he finds one of his goldfish floating belly up in the tank. At the sight he screams insanely and has to be slapped to his senses, but next morning he bounces up for breakfast as though nothing had happened.

"Say, Dad, d'you ever think about gettin' married?"

Dad (Glenn Ford) ducks the question like a well-trained parent, but in due time he meets three women he likes: a blonde (Shirley Jones), a brunette (Dina Merrill), a redhead (Stella Stevens). He inclines to the brunette. His son says nix. "She's got skinny eyes and big busts, like the bad ladies in the comic books." Dad laughs, but later on he is forced to admit that kids actually can learn something about life from comic books. But not everything. After bringing up father, the boy develops romantic complications of his own, and he talks them over with the old man in a scene so sly that it doesn't really matter if it's much too cute.

"Dad," he says, as solemn as only six can be, "for the first time in my whole life, I'm in love. Her name is Cherry. And she loves me, Dad."

"That's good. Is she pretty?"

"She's beautiful! Except from behind. Girls aren't so pretty from behind, Dad."

"I see."

"Dad, I'd like to give her a present."

"That's nice. What?"

"Money."

"Money! How about a book?"

"She can't read very good, Dad. And besides, I'd like to give her the thing she likes best."

"Money is out! Give her something that means a lot to you. Women like that."

"My old sneakers!"

"For God's sake!"

"But Dad, she loves my old sneakers. She won the getting-undressed-underwater test in them."

"Son, it's a perfect gift."

"There's one thing, Dad, I didn't tell you. When you meet Cherry, don't look surprised. It might hurt her feelings."

"Surprised?"

"Dad, Cherry is--a little bit--" Delicacy and candor struggle pictorially in the boy's face; but then, squaring his jaw, he turns to his father and, man to man, blasts him with the awful truth: "FAT."

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