Good movie but grossly overrated

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is an all-time favorite movie of my family as kids growing up. Whenever we get together we find opportunities to use lines from the movie for various situations. For instance, when the woman frantically calls the butler, Saisamond! Saisamond! that always cracks us up. The story is just wonderful, the characters believable, and even the dubbed words are not a problem. I forgot that they were dubbed. I agree with others who have said that the Shirley Temple version pales in comparison with this version. Would love to have it. I would like to get a copy of the movie. Could someone email how I can get a copy of it. [email protected] Thanks.

The lack of pretension, straightforward storyline and location shooting force you to judge this film as what it is, namely a fairly faithful adaptation of a children's classic with a cast of carefully chosen actors, a good central performance, solid support and lots of beautiful scenery. By now the story of the young Swiss girl living in a mountain village with her adored grandfather, being whisked off to Frankfurt and then returning home has been told and re-told on film and television, not least in 1937 when child star Shirley Temple, then at the height of her fame, made a not-too-successful stab at the role and though I haven't seen the Temple version I can well imagine how Swiss she sounded if indeed they didn't transpose it to the Rockies. This version from 1952 is both pleasant and watchable.

This is the first film version of the famous children's book by Johanna Spyri in German language. It tells the story of a little swiss girl who lives with her grandfather Alp-Öhi solitarily in the swiss mountains. Someday Heidi is taken away to Frankfurt/Germany where she makes friends with Clara, a little girl who sits in a wheelchair, but becomes homesick... "Heidi" is a carefully made, affectionate film with good actors and good direction by Luigi Comencini, an Italian director who has had made some film in the neorealistic style and later entertainment films with the best known Italian actors. The film certainly benefits by the fact it was made in Switzerland, where the story in fact takes place. The style of this film is influenced by the visually ambitious so called "Bergfilme" (mountain-films) for example by Arnold Fanckh or Luis Trenker, as well as it seems influenced a little by the style of the Italian "Neorealism". This film version even tells about the social reality of the 19th century. Enjoyable is it's absence of kitsch so many mountain-films as well as children's films are infected by. A good film. (Much better than it's sequel "Heidi und Peter" which I saw the day after)

I haven't seen this movie since I was a child but even then I preferred it over the Shirley Temple film.The version I saw was dubbed into English. Normally that irritated me (and still does, the rare times I see a dubbed movie--nowadays they're more often subtitled) but it actually made it easier to get into the movie because I didn't have to read any subtitles (and I don't know German). I read well above my grade level but it still would have been distracting. Now I probably wouldn't mind.This movie is much more faithful to the book than the 1937 version.Probably because it was filmed in Switzerland, where the story takes place, it has beautiful scenery. They didn't have use any back projections and sound stages for the outdoor sequences, something I noticed even as a child.I looked forward to each time it came on TV in the Los Angeles area, where I grew up. I don't why they stopped showing it unless it was because the Shirley Temple version, which began to be shown a lot at that time, simply displaced it. If so, it's a shame. I'd love to see it again (and again and again, just like back then).I was always fascinated with the story because my great-grandmother was from Switzerland and was a child at the time the book was originally published.