User Reviews

Little Friend starts off with one of its most chilling scenes; the young girl is having a nightmare and things around her room morph into grotesque figures, leading you into thinking this is going to be a horror movie or something. It's not, but it does get quite disturbing.

An upper class little English girl seems to have the perfect life, until she becomes an unwilling witness to her parents' divorce.

She is forced to testify in court when she runs away late one night to the house of her mother's friend (who said she could drop by "any time", and she decides that 11pm is the time to do it!), but then runs off when she sees her mother's fur coat there and the stark truth hits her. She then ends up at the shop of her friend, a lower class boy who saved her from being hit by a car once. This boy's part is not developed enough; you see him being teased for being lower-class when he attends a part of Felicity's with all of her posh friends, and you can see that the young girl has an obvious crush on him, but his part seems to falter midway.

After it is found where she had been that night, she is put on the witness stand in the court and has to say whether she saw any sign of her mother at the friend's house, or not. The stress of having to place one parent above the other, however, is far too much for her.

A good movie that feels a little long, but you have to stay watching to see what happens in the end. Also the only movie I've ever seen where a little girl tries to gas herself. 7 out of 10.

Nova Pilbeam was a superb child actress. She didn't rely on cute looks, golden curls or singing and dancing. She relied on her talent. She didn't make many films but two were directed by Alfred Hitchcock and one was a superior historical drama. "Little Friend" was her triumph.

The film starts with a surreal nightmare that comes together as the film proceeds. Felicity is awakened by her parents quarrelling. Her parents are on the verge of separating - she is too young to understand the complexities of the relationship between her mother and father and Mr. Hilliard, her mother's lover.

Mr. Hilliard is an actor and has given Felicity a signed photo "to my little friend". She is old enough to know something is wrong. At the park she sees her mother out riding with Mr. Hilliard - after that she decides to "play up". After almost being run over she meets Leonard (Jimmy Hanley) who saves her. They (Felicity and her Nanny, (Jean Cadell) visit his mother's bakery shop and a friendship develops.

Felicity comes from a family of wealth and privilege and the film shows that money cannot buy happiness. There is also a birthday party where Felicity invites Leonard. The other children isolate him because they know he is not of their class.

The film is a harrowing depiction of the effects of divorce on a young girl. The film is stylistically directed by Berthold Viertel and written by Christopher Isherwood and Margaret Kennedy. Wth gowns by Schiaparelli it is a very high class film in every way.

Felicity runs away to visit Hilliard who has said his "little friend" can visit whenever she likes. She wants to ask him not to see her mother anymore but recognises her mother's fur coat on the couch. There is a frightening court room scene where Felicity is treated as a "hostile witness" with both parents using her in their efforts to "win points" over the other. In the stark climax Felicity goes home and tries to gas herself.

It is a film you would not find coming out of Hollywood in 1934.

With apologies to every child actress who ever stepped onto the screen, I hereby state that the best performance ever given my one was that of a now virtually forgotten British youngster, Nova Pilbeam. The picture "Little Friend," and most of her others have long been mostly unavailable.

Americans saw Nova Pilbeam only three times as a child. Of the few pictures she made as a young leading woman, only one-Hitchcock's "The Girl Was Young/Young & Innocent"-is worth mentioning in any review of her performances.

She was fourteen when she played Felicity in "Little Friend." It's the story of divorce told through the eyes of a youngster, old enough to grasp what is happening, too young to comprehend the circumstances. She was a remarkably plain little girl in an era when screen children were all curls and dimples. But in her desperate anguish which drove her to the brink of suicide, she was almost beautiful.

She gave another superb performance two years later as Lady Jane Grey, the pawn of royal intrigue, in "Nine Days a Queen/Tudor Rose," certainly one of the most distinguished historical dramas ever filmed. And she appeared for Hitchcock twice-as the kidnapped child in the first version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and in "The Girl Was Young," the most underrated of his British thrillers.

Nova Pilbeam is just an odd name to movie fans today, but I'll wager that nobody who saw "Little Friend," or "Nine Days a Queen" has ever forgotten her.