Shirley Temple movies

I woke up, having had the strangest dream about Shirley Temple Movies.  In the dream, I was a film editor and I was working on editing "The Wizard of Oz" but I kept complaining to my colleagues that the cuts they were making to the film were not good.  Literally, they were cutting the heads off the actors and splicing them back together  them and you could see the cuts when the film played.  I left the room, past my colleague who was smoking a cigarette in the hall and told him "Don't lock the door, I'll be right back."   I went out the door to a large round garden where everything was sepia toned. Everything.  Someone explained that they were making a new Shirley Temple film, but since Shirley was too old to do it, that they had a fake Shirley and the sepia would hide everything.  Fake Shirley was baking cupcakes but announced she had to ride off with the cowboys, and she did.  They were immediately chased by a bunch of "Indians" in that faux headdress favored in 1930's films.   Every "Indian"  was lying flat on the horse, their headdresses lying flat across their backs all the way to the tail of the horse. On closer inspection, the headdress was tree branches and the sepia made the leaves look like feathers. The "Indians" were really frightened housewives ( again wearing clothing appropriate to a 30's stereotype) and they were clinging not to reins, but the handles of baby buggies.  Nyquil dreams, I suppose.

I got up thinking about Shirley Temple films, the real ones not the one they were making in my dream.  I loved Shirley as a kid, but thinking about them as an adult, they kind of give me the creeps.  In "poor Little Rich Girl"  she charms this old guy into letting her and her pretend parents into letting them be on the radio show.  The whole scene is so pedophile creepy, I couldn't watch it.  "Susannah of the Mounties"?  She's the only survivor of an Indian attack and she comes out smiling and singing?  Huh?   I love Shirley's talent and the first class actors whose work make her films worth watching, but the story lines are just something awful.  They were knocking them out as fast as possible, it WAS the Depression and the films were very popular escapist fare.  Looking at them with a modern eye, some of it just makes my skin crawl.  You cannot apply a modern mindset to things created in the past, but must look at it as a piece of history and learn from it.