Just Around the Corner

Penny’s father is an architect who cannot find work. Since the crash he has been working as a janitor and engineer in a hotel. Father and daughter live in a flat in the hotel basement. Penny makes friends with a grumpy old man and takes him for Uncle Sam. He is in fact a wealthy property developer, and in the end he backs her father’s plans. That gives the father his chance to carry out his scheme for clearing and rebuilding the slums. The film tells the Depression years from a child’s eye and from an optimistic place. Song and dance take up a good part of the account, and this was the fourth and last time Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson danced together. Irving Cummings’s seventy minute American film was completed in 1938.