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Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm: the book vs. the movie

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) — the Shirley Temple version — which keeps the title and very little else · Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) — Mary Pickford's silent version, adapted by Frances Marion — the one that follows the book

Read first, or watch first?

This is the rare case where order truly doesn't matter, because the 1938 film can't spoil a book it doesn't contain — a kid can watch it cold and meet Wiggin's Rebecca later with everything still ahead of her. If the family wants the actual story on a screen, the 1917 Mary Pickford silent is the only version that tries: Frances Marion's adaptation keeps the aunts, the brick house, and the shape of the plot, with twenty-five-year-old Pickford playing ten. Take the 1938 for what it is — eighty minutes, rated G, rentable, with Temple and Bill Robinson's finale as the keeper — and give the book to the kid who wants to know what Sunnybrook was actually like.

What the movie changed

Rebecca becomes a radio act

In the 1938 film Rebecca Winstead is an orphan who auditions to be 'Little Miss America' for a breakfast-cereal radio campaign, and the plot is a talent agent (Randolph Scott) hunting for the voice that got away. The studio's own credits only claim the story was suggested by the novel. Wiggin's Rebecca is not an orphan, never sings for money, and the nearest thing to show business in the book is a Wednesday-evening missionary meeting.

Aunt Miranda moves to Sunnybrook

The film puts Aunt Miranda on Sunnybrook Farm itself. In the book the geography is the whole point: Sunnybrook is the poor, loved farm Rebecca has to leave, and the brick house in Riverboro is the strict, spotless place she is sent — the story lives in the space between the two.

A stepfather the book doesn't have

The film gives Rebecca a scheming stepfather (William Demarest) who wants to cash in on her. In the novel her father is dead, her mother is alive and gentle and overwhelmed at Sunnybrook with six other children, and nobody in it is a villain — the book runs on friction between good people, not on a bad guy.

Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson's finale

The film ends with Temple and Bill Robinson in a military tap routine arranged from 'Parade of the Wooden Soldiers' — one of the four films the pair made together, and the reason many families keep it. Temple also sings 'An Old Straw Hat.' None of it has anything to do with Maine in 1903, and it is still a fine two minutes of film history.

What only the book has

The pink parasol goes down the well

Rebecca's dearest possession is a little pink parasol. When she decides she has disgraced the family, she doesn't wait to be punished — she throws it down the well herself, where it wrecks the pump. Aunt Miranda's response ('you're too big to be whipped, and I shall never whip you') is one of the book's strangest, truest scenes about conscience, and no film has ever tried it.

Three hundred cakes of soap

The soap-selling campaign — Rebecca pitching a stranger on his porch until he buys three hundred cakes so the Simpson children can win a premium banquet lamp — is the most famous episode in the book, and the moment the stranger becomes 'Mr. Aladdin.' The 1938 film has no trace of it.

Her verses, misspellings and all

The book prints Rebecca's poetry exactly as she writes it — 'My gardian angel is asleep / At leest he doth not keep / His weary watch' — and then, pages later, her own corrected copy. Wiggin lets a child be genuinely, endearingly bad at the thing she loves most, which is rarer in children's books than it should be.

Aunt Miranda's apology

The title of the last chapter is the thing the whole book has been waiting for, and it arrives only after Miranda is gone — through aunt Jane, and through a will leaving Rebecca the brick house. The hard aunt never once says it to her face. It is the book's most grown-up piece of storytelling, and no adaptation has kept it.

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