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Title: Miserable mis-rendering!
Review: As one who finds Johanna Spyri's "Heidi" to be one of the best children's books, I find this transition to melodrama dreadful, and totally untrue to the book's text. The independent Heidi, whose warmth and faith are such that she is fearless and completely kind, is reduced to a picture book moppet. Worse yet, characters such as Dete and Fraulein Rottenmeir, who, in the book, are respectively rather self-centred and puzzled at the lower class child, are depicted as totally wicked - ready to sell Heidi to the gypsies! Clara, who in the original is disabled more because of her elders' fear and over-protectiveness than because of her unnamed illness, now is the target of a wicked governess who has a financial interest in keeping her ill and weak.This dreadful film is suited only to those who are die hard fans of Shirley Temple.
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