The Best Ever Feel Bad Movies - The Blue Bird

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Sometimes called The Blue Bird Of Happiness this 1940 movie was Shirley Temple’s consolation prize after she lost out on the role that took Judy Garland down the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard Of Oz just a year before. The Blue Bird has many similar fantasy themes and echoes of the superior movie; a mix of black and white & colour cinema photography, several songs (none of them remotely memorable, and all but two chopped from the movie pre-release) and a long fantasy journey presented as a Technicolor dream. Temple plays a spoilt arrogant little brat called Mytyl, who finds a friendly and strange brown-coloured bird in the woods, which she adopts as a pet. Her best friend is ill, and Mytyl is told to give her friend the bird as a Christmas gift to make her feel better. Mytyl refuses to part with the bird. From that moment things start to go wrong. Mytyl’s father is suddenly conscripted to the army (the movie is set in 18th century Germany at the time of the Napoleonic Wars) and ordered to march off to the barracks within days. Mytyl now dreams that she and her brother are sent by a fairy-godmother to find the mysterious Blue Bird Of Happiness accompanied by their cat and their dog who are turned into people by the fairy-godmother. While Dorothy got to see Munchkins and flying monkeys, Mytyl & co find the ghosts of their grand-parents and the very creepy essences of children not yet born; thousands of toddlers (many of them played by actors already in late adolescence) waiting to be conceived, knowing in some cases that they won’t be born, or that their future parents will be mean. One child is destined to be Abraham Lincoln though. The real sadness is Mytyl meeting her own soon to be born sister who tells her that she (the sister) will die young. The as yet unborn children know their pre-determined futures which they will forget if and when born. Two children who love one another’s company are brutally, cruelly separated by Old Father Time because they are to be born generations apart. While the theme of Oz was to see that coming home is what brings joy, the point of The Blue Bird is that Happiness isn’t to be kept but given away. The grand-parents gave and departed, the not yet conceived sister will only join the family and fleetingly bring pleasure there. Happiness, like a free bird, flies away. Dorothy’s happiness was sustained. Mytyl learns that everything good is fleeting, finite and fragile. The brown bird turns blue after her adventures. Mytyl freely gives it to her crippled friend who just gets just a glimpse of the bird before it escapes. Mytyl feels confident she can capture it again if ever required to, but for now it is gone. Mytyl’s journey seems pointless. All she sees is despair and misery apart from her own brief act of altruism, for which she will eventually be rewarded with the early death of her as yet unborn sister. To learn to be nicer she has had to see her selfish cat turn into a would-be murderer before it dies in a forest fire it starts itself, her possessive, clingy, dead grand-parents upset that the living children can’t stay with them longer (forever?), and the limbo of the unborn that teaches her that she has no real choice but to give in to peer group pressure. The Blue Bird offers a more realistic moral message than Oz – be nice to others, and share what happiness you get because overall, life sucks and then you die. Though that message might be downbeat, it is strangely uplifting to see it spelt out for once. The Blue Bird was a commercial flop; its bleak tone, Temple playing out of character as an arrogant selfish tomboy, and its obvious parallels to Garland’s finest hour flat-lined its chances. Nevertheless it is a thoughtful, if rather gloomy movie trying its best to make audiences feel uplifted. A 1976 remake starring Patsy Kensit (as Mytyl), Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda quite rightly sank quickly without trace. Youtube – The scene featuring children yet to be born Arthur Chappell