Chester, I have several sets of Shirley Temple movies -- all those pink box sets released by 20th Century Fox -- and as you can imagine, lots and lots of John Ford movies. And having seen all those Shirley Temple movies, and all those John Ford movies -- Wee Willie Winkie is definitely a John Ford movie that stars Shirley Temple. (Which probably meant that all the Shirley Temple fans would see it -- probably most of them didn't care who directed her films.) Joseph McBride in his Ford bio quotes Darryl Zanuck as stating that they very deliberately planned for it to be a Ford film, but just one that happened to be told from a child's point of view. Here's the quote: "My idea about doing this picture is to forget that it is a Shirley Temple picture. That is, not to forget that she is the star, but to write the story as if it were a Little Women or a David Copperfield...All the hokum must be thrown out. The characters must be made real, human, believable...and it must be told from the child's viewpoint, through her eyes."
McBride goes on to write, "Wee Willie Winkie provides a case study of how Ford approached what could have been a potboiler and infused it with his own artistic sensibility. If there were any real justice in Hollywood, Ford would have won an Oscar for a film such as this one, whose truly superior craftsmanship is all the more impressive for seeming so effortless. With larger-than-life romanticism, Ford deftly creates a child's storybook vision of the world, then introduces unexpectedly touching moments as reality impinges on the consciousness of the innocent protagonist. This stylized feeling was heightened in the film's original release by tinting the daytime scenes sepia and the nighttime scenes blue, reviving a practice from the silent cinema. In one shot of breathtaking beauty, Priscilla, left behind in a mountain tent, watches through a translucent veil as the rebel horsemen ride off to battle; it is as if the child is seeing the events of her life projected on her own inner movie screen."
There's a lot more about Ford's style and themes infused into Wee Willie Winkie but you get the drift. 
It is visually such a lovely movie -- I can think of all sorts of shots that linger in my memory. It's not just a skillfully-made piece of popular entertainment, like many of Temple's films, it's a real work of art.
And Victor McLaglen as Sergeant MacDuff and Cesar Romero as the Afghan leader Khoda Khan nearly steal the whole thing! They're both absolutely wonderful.
I probably have several hundred DVDs of movies that aren't all that great, but I bought because they star a favorite actor or were directed by a favorite director, even if this or that movie wasn't his best work. 
