Little Miss Marker

New York, the early thirties. A man comes to the window of the bookmaker Sorrowful Jones without enough money and leaves his small daughter as security; in bookmakers' language that is called a marker. The man never comes back. The child, known from then on as Marky, is left in the hands of Sorrowful and his friend the singer Bangles Carson. Directed by Alexander Hall, the film was adapted from a story by Damon Runyon; the particular language and types of the New York bookmakers are his. Shirley Temple plays Marky, her first leading role in a major production, and the film made her a star. The telling is about hard men softening in front of a child, but it does not hide the dark side of the story either. It was added to the National Film Registry in the United States in 1998.