August 18 – Freddie Bartholomew TCM Summer Under the Stars

Freddie Bartholomew holds a special place for me (see below) so I feel more qualified than usual to make recommendations.

The big ones are all well worth their reputations: Captains Courageous, Little Lord Fauntleroy and David Copperfield are must views. Lloyd's of London is very good, but like David Copperfield Freddie disappears early. An interesting Tyrone Power film all the same. The Devil Is a Sissy is a personal favorite, don't miss it! A Yank at Eton is very good. Professional Soldier is very rare.

Any movies that I've specifically written about are linked inside the following schedule. There are a few:

Saturday, August 18 - Freddie Bartholomew - TCM Summer Under the Stars

• 6:00 am - A Yank at Eton (1942) starring Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, Ian Hunter
• 8:00 am - The Devil Is a Sissy (1936) starring Freddie Bartholomew, Jackie Cooper, Mickey Rooney
• 10:00 am - Tom Brown's School Days (1940) starring Freddie Bartholomew, Cedric Hardwicke, Jimmy Lydon
• 11:30 am - Lord Jeff (1938) starring Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney, Charles Coburn
• 1:00 pm - Listen Darling (1938) starring Judy Garland, Freddie Bartholomew, Mary Astor
• 2:30 pm - Anna Karenina (1935) starring Greta Garbo, Fredric March, Basil Rathbone
• 4:30 pm - Professional Soldier (1935) starring Victor McLaglen, Freddie Bartholomew, Gloria Stuart
• 6:00 pm - Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) starring Freddie Bartholomew, C. Aubrey Smith, Dolores Costello
• 8:00 pm - Captains Courageous (1937) starring Spencer Tracy, Freddie Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore
• 10:15 pm - Kidnapped (1938) starring Warner Baxter, Freddie Bartholomew, Arleen Whelan
• 12:00 am - Lloyd's of London (1936) starring Freddie Bartholomew, Madeleine Carroll, Tyrone Power
• 2:15 am - David Copperfield (1935) starring Freddie Bartholomew, W.C. Fields, Lionel Barrymore
• 4:30 am - Sepia Cinderella (1947) starring Billy Daniels, Sheila Guyse, Freddie Bartholomew

Today's Summer Under the Stars post is a little different. No clippings. But instead I point you to my revised and reworked 10,000-plus word biography of Freddie Bartholomew which contains dozen of old clippings sourced in the bibliography.

This is a project I began New Year's 2011. 20 months later I'm still going and there's still more to do!

It took quite a bit more work than I had anticipated to update my Freddie Bartholomew biography. You see, when I originally began it I anticipated it being a single simple little post. I quickly discovered that would be impossible.

In 1992 The New York Times printed Freddie's obituary. It contained major factual errors. Being that it is The New York friggin' Times the errors have been picked up as fact over the years.

Back in January 2011 both Wikipedia and the IMDb had lousy Freddie Bartholomew biographies as well. That has since been corrected in a major way on both counts--no thanks to me, but I either know or have a pretty good idea of who fixed those pages up and they're owed a debt -- Thank you from your fellow Freddie fan!

My old Freddie Bartholomew biography was written over several months which were a true period of discovery. The revised edition is a single entry. The old posts will now redirect to this single 10,000-plus word entry.

I will try to rescue old comments from the original three-part entry. Some of those comments are as interesting as anything I wrote, so it'd be a shame to lose them! Hopefully I can get them over.

I hope to have all of the images and more added to the new Freddie page by the end of the weekend. There are a lot!

The new biography page contains many new sources including a good dozen or so paid newspaper sources; 4-6 free Google magazine and newspaper sources; a quote from Basil Rathbone's autobiography and citations from Helen Hoerle's 1930's Big Little Book (a surprising mix of fact and fantasy all at once).

I've also rewritten every line of the old biography. All of the old facts are there ... and more. Paragraphs are generally shorter and I've tightened up the writing in general to create what I think is a better written piece.

I'm pretty proud of it, check it out: Freddie Bartholomew Biography