Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) is a David O. Selznick family drama — watch it online on iFILM. Director John Cromwell adapted Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel with Freddie Bartholomew in the lead role.

Cedric is nine, raised in a Brooklyn tenement by his widowed mother. Then word arrives that his grandfather across the Atlantic is a British earl, and Cedric is the heir. The old man is cold and proud and entirely unprepared for a grandson this straightforwardly kind. C. Aubrey Smith plays the earl with full aristocratic stiffness. Mickey Rooney turns up as Cedric's American street friend.

Bartholomew carries the whole film without a single false note — there's no child-actor artifice in what he does here. Selznick produced this three years before Gone with the Wind. Stream Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) on iFILM.