Just Around the Corner 1938

Penny Hale Shirley Temple is attending a private girls’ school when she is informed that her enrollment has ended and she will be heading home to live with her widowed father, Jeff Hale Charles Farrell. He is a prominent architect who is in dire financial straits and can no longer afford Penny’s tuition. Furthermore, Jeff has lost his penthouse apartment and his car, but he has secured a menial job in the building as its custodian, so he and Penny will still have a home: a small basement dwelling. Although Jeff is humbled by this downturn, the always optimistic Penny views the change as an adventure. Waters [Franklin Pangborn] is an overly officious apartment employee who tries to keep her out of places in the building she once frequented when her father was wealthy.

Jeff is romantically linked with Lola [Amanda Duff], Lola Ramsby’s niece, while Lola’s uncle Samuel Henshaw [Bill Robinson] is a major financier who once employed Jeff to design a major building project, but discontinued it. Penny also befriends Lola’s brother Milton [Benny Bartlett], a pampered and effete boy. Penny helps him shed his prim and snobbish appearance, cutting off his prominent curls in an attempt to make him look more like a “he-man.”

A discouraged Jeff explains to Penny that the United States is mired in the Great Depression because Uncle Sam is being pestered by too many people who want his money. He shows her a newspaper cartoon that illustrates this idea. Penny discovers that Samuel Henshaw is referred to as “Uncle Sam” by his niece and nephew and amusingly believes that Samuel Henshaw is actually Uncle Sam. Henshaw considers re-hiring Jeff and assigning him to a project in far-off Borneo to keep him away from Lola.

Shortly thereafter Penny sees Henshaw accosted by a group of pushy reporters. She helps drive them away with a few well-placed kicks to their shins. Penny tells Henshaw that she sympathizes with him because of all the people who want to siphon money from “Uncle Sam.” The irascible Henshaw takes a liking to Penny. She stages a benefit for Henshaw, charging a nickel apiece for a show that features a song-and-dance performance by her and the apartment building’s doorman. This impresses Samuel Henshaw so much that he announces the building project that he had earlier abandoned will be restarted with Jeff in charge. Jeff and Lola plan to be married.