Reviews by JxSxPx

I fully admit to being skeptical about the Andy Hardy films. I don’t mind a little sugar, but there’s nothing sour to offset the sweet about these films. They’re pleasing little lies about a piece of Americana that likely never existed. A better written and acted The Brady Bunch, if you will. No problem is too big to resolve in 85-plus minutes before you’re off to Andy’s next misadventure.

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante is more of the same: Andy’s a cocky shit that tries to charm a girl (Diana Lewis, the debutante in question), gets sage advice from his father, and shares some great scenes with Betsy (Judy Garland, once more capable of coaxing more depth of feeling out of Rooney than any other co-star). Preachy, heavily sentimental, and with regressive ideas about gender and female roles in society, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante is a creaky relic.

It’s only when Garland and Rooney share a late-night car drive and Rooney tenderly kisses her cheek that something human and real comes to life. It’s a shocking moment of real and authentic romantic confusion and anguish in an otherwise ersatz story about small town virtues in combat with big city vice. While so much of the film is blatantly manipulative and toothless, the scenes Mickey and Judy share elevate the material into something electric and special. You’ll remember Garland’s tears and Rooney’s efforts to smooth it all over far more than you will any of Lewis Stone’s hokey pieces of advice about avarice in every city/town.

Small town American was never as picture perfect and saccharine as it was in the Andy Hardy series. There’s the stoic but supportive father (Lewis Stone), fretful loving mother (Fay Holden), nicely combative older sister (Cecilia Parker), and Andy, the teenager on the right side of mischief-making (Mickey Rooney). They’re a postcard family in sitcom-level conundrums that feel stretched out to accommodate the 80-plus running times of their films.

Love Finds Andy Hardy is probably the most famous entry in the franchise, if for no other reason than the appearances of Judy Garland and Lana Turner, both on the cusp of superstardom. It’s also a quaint little charmer that’s all Norman Rockwell Americana and innocent shenanigans involving an irrepressible teenager boy. It’s a silly little thing that alternates between giving you a cavity with its sugarcoated homespun imagery and charming with its naivete.

Andy wants to buy a car, but he’s short the $8 dollars necessary to pay it off. His friend offers him a compromise: entertain his girlfriend (Lana Turner, the safest naughty girl imaginable) during the Christmas break while he’s gone, and he’ll give Andy the missing $8 as a thank you. There’s naturally complications, including the reappearance of Andy’s girlfriend Polly (Ann Rutherford, all wide-eyed sweetness), the introduction of Betsy (Garland), a poor little rich girl that’s got a crush on the uninterested Andy, and some light familial drama that functions as time waster and stretching of the thin narrative to feature length. Everything wraps up neatly by the time the final credits roll around and we’re off to the next entry/misadventure of Andy.

Love Finds Andy Hardy is best when we ignore the other family members and just zero in on Andy’s quest for girls, cars, and a good time. I swear, if you threw in rock and roll and surf, this thing could easily restructure into a late 50s/early 60s idyllic teenage movie. It probably did and just swapped out Andy for Gidget, let’s be real.

Back to the movie at hand. Rooney’s a horny cartoon around Lana Turner, who pouts and seduces with alacrity even at this early age. He’s a chaste neighborhood kid around Ann Rutherford’s Polly, a long-suffering girlfriend type that seems primed to knock him on his ass at any moment. But Rooney’s best around Garland’s Betsy as her wide-eyed vulnerability brings out a gentleness in the actor and character that provides honest emotion to poke through the glossy, sugary veneer. Garland nearly steals the movie from him with her authentic performance and knack for comedy.

It all just goes breezing by until order is once more restored. The family conflicts are smoothed over, Polly and Andy are reunited, Betsy manages to set everything right, and the big Christmas dance provides some magic in the form of Garland’s singing. Love Finds Andy Hardy is a lovely little thing, but proof that too much sweetness can be detrimental after a while.  

The first pairing of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland finds the pair playing second fiddle to a waifish British male youth. No, not Freddie Bartholomew, who seems tailor-made for the lead role and was mysteriously dropped, but Ronald Sinclair, a carbon-copy of Bartholomew. Sinclair’s lacking in charisma and on-camera naturalism, too mannered and too artificial without the personality to pull it off, and he’s overrun by Rooney, Garland, Sophie Tucker, and C. Aubrey Smith.

Yet I still found myself engaged with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. It’s a minor film, but one filled with heart and charm in direct proportion to its narrative thinness. Sinclair is a proper English boy who travels to America with his grandfather (Smith) and racehorse searching for a jockey (Rooney, all cocky swagger and heart of gold), meet a boarding house owner (Tucker) and her young niece (Garland, precocious and engaging), and encounter several obstacles before the big climatic race. Will Sinclair’s thoroughbred win the derby? Of course, but it’s more fun to watch this earliest glimpse of the peculiar chemistry between Mickey and Judy in embryonic form.

Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry gives Rooney a plum early role as the jockey that finds his ambitions in direct conflict with his abusive, absent father’s machinations. I don’t know what it is exactly about Rooney as a jockey, but it’s an archetype that Rooney always exceled at in films as varied as National Velvet and The Black Stallion. His verbal sparring with Garland is a delight as their kids-next-door looks and vulnerabilities immediately mesh well together. Their give-and-take would blossom in their further films, but they’re already demonstrating an innate comfort and language with each other here that’s primed for further exploration. If there’s any reason to invest the time in watching this sweet little movie, it’s in the beginning of the Mickey and Judy on-screen pairing. That’s reason enough.

Judy Garland’s not a girl, not yet a woman in Little Nellie Kelly, an oddball film that has her playing both mother and daughter. Loosely based on the George M. Cohan play of the same name, Garland finds herself stuck between the opposing male forces of her life in both incarnations and a metric ton of Irish clichés sprinkled on top. The whole thing feels engineered for viewings on St. Patrick’s Day and not for much else.

Here’s a bit of historical trivia for you: this is the lone death scene in Garland’s entire career. It comes early in the film when she dies post-childbirth, and she reappears as the teenaged daughter. Garland was eighteen at the time and plays both a little older and a little younger than her real age. The role(s) don’t give her much in the way of variation aside from an attempt at an Irish accent in one and a love interest in the second, her Babes in Arms co-star Douglas McPhail.

Garland tries valiantly to make this mawkish tripe work, but not even her immense talents can quite overcome it all. George Murphy and Charles Winninger play the two male counterparts of Nellie’s life. In Ireland, Garland is Nellie Noonan in love with Murphy’s Jerry Kelly and caretaker of her belligerent drunk father, Winninger. The father hates his future son-in-law but still travels with them to America. Nellie Noonan dies, Murphy and Winninger spar over raising the daughter, and enter a long stalemate that places Nellie Kelly as the peacemaker and object of their affection. Eventually she meets a suitor, McPhail has a lovely baritone but zero screen presence, and the fractious cycle between Murphy and Winninger starts anew.

Winninger’s character is clearly meant as a lovable caricature but plays a deeply unlikeable, manipulative bastard. Garland and Murphy are unbelievable as lovers what with him being very obviously twenty-years her senior. They fare far better as loving father and daughter. It’s hard to buy Garland’s instant love affair with McPhail as well, but much of that problem lands squarely on his shoulder. So here comes Judy’s powerful voice to save the day on songs like “It’s a Great Day for the Irish” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” A must-watch for the Garland aficionado (hey!), but skippable for the rest unless you’re looking for a creaky blarney about the auld sod.

Rarely has 75 minutes feel so interminable as it does during Listen, Darling. The plot is a bit of nonsense that plays like the lamest of sitcom conceits: two siblings (Judy Garland and Scotty Beckett) enlist their best friend (Freddie Bartholomew) to help kidnap their mom (Mary Astor) so she doesn’t enter a loveless marriage. Ha ha ha….

You can guess what follows – a proper bachelor that the kids like and the mom finds reminds her of her dead husband (Walter Pidgeon), a couple musical interludes by Garland (“Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” in a minor reading is the obvious highlight), and groan-inducing child actor performances abound. Bartholomew was nearing the end of his time as a movie star, and I never quite got his appeal. He seems so grossly artificial next to Garland, and just plain awkward next to Pidgeon and Astor.

Listen, Darling winds up restoring heteronormative order by letting the kooky bachelor and merry widow wind up together with the kids’ approval. Astor and Garland would reunite in six years for a much better project, Pidgeon would go on to make far better films, and this whole thing feels like it was made merely to keep these rising stars (or transitioning ones) in the public consciousness. 1939 would treat Garland’s immeasurable talents far better with a pair of classics that gave her sterling material.

There sure is a lot here. Broadway Melody of 1938 is one of those “something for everyone” entertainments that winds up being of little value to anyone. It doesn’t settle into its backstage theatrical story, its supporting plot about an aging performer is just there, and there’s a lot of time spent on horseracing and training a thoroughbred. At least the film is smart enough to often cede the floor to its biggest strengths: its female stars.

Eleanor Powell gives one of those happily broke, starry-eyed dreamer performances that litter the Depression-era musical, but she’s at least cute and charming about it. Sure, her character plays a bit like a well-adjusted speed freak set loose upon the populace, but we also get to watch her dance. Powell is a so-so actress but a dynamite dancer, possibly the greatest female dancer ever captured on celluloid. Her finale is astounding as she gets tossed around by various dancers then zips back into her machine-gun taping and elegant kicks. Her dance duet with George Murphy plays like a Fred-and-Ginger-style pas de deux straight out of Top Hat or Swing Time.

She’s surrounded by enough incident and filler to propel two other films, at least. There’s George Murphy and Buddy Ebsen as a pair of old vaudevillians who become her best pals, Robert Taylor as Powell’s love interest and a Broadway producer, a sneeze expert, a wannabe Opera singer and his Italian stereotype uncle, and a stage mother who runs a boarding house for actors and her teenage daughter. Whew, I’m wiped out just typing all of that, and we’re still missing a few bits and pieces along the way.

The sneeze expert is a time suck, Ebsen is a bit awkward here, Murphy and Taylor are fine is sacked with flavorless roles, and the Italians are just loud, annoying caricatures that needed to be removed. It’s that stage mother and teenage daughter that really stick out in a positive way. They’re played by Sophie Tucker and Judy Garland, and Broadway Melody of 1938 quickly shapes up into something engaging when it lets these two do pretty much anything. Imagine a version of this film with Tucker and Garland leading it? No guarantee it would’ve been better, but their charisma alone would’ve powered through the dead spots.  

A cinematic oddity that splices together campus comedy, sports underdog (football, in this case), and manic musical into… something. I’m not quite sure what it all is, but it’s a lot of something that’s diverting if thin. There’s wisecracking Patsy Kelly and an effete Jack Haley as a married couple, a strangely Oscar-nominated turn from Stuart Erwin as a redneck with a talent for football, and a cavalcade of collegiate brothers. Of course, there’s something about the big game, mistaken identity, boundless “can-do” energy that permeates Depression-era cinema, and a strange subplot involving a Communist-sympathizing student as a punchline. What really stands out in Pigskin Parade is the cinematic debut of a teenaged Judy Garland constantly asking if people want to hear her sing and being rebuked in her earliest scenes. She does eventually let those mutant lungs belt out a few songs, but Pigskin Parade is so overloaded with musical interludes, hillbilly comedy, and anything else you can think of that Garland’s belting is but one small fraction of a weirder tapestry.

It’s impossible to separate the final version of The Pirate from its fractured, turbulent production. Star Judy Garland was absent for roughly 75% of its shooting schedule as her marriage to director Vincente Minnelli crumbled, her pill addictions took a stronger hold on her life, and her mental/emotional states unraveled accordingly. Garland’s bad behavior, however understandable in hindsight, causes much of the final film to be handed over to Gene Kelly, in full hammy swagger and never sexier.

This lopsided effect leaves The Pirate as one of the strangest musicals to come out of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM. After all, Garland doesn’t sing until roughly thirty minutes into the film, Kelly’s extended dance sequences get the lion’s share of time, and the plot is a practically a bitch in heat. Somehow the confluence of Kelly’s peacocking, Garland’s overwhelming neurosis, and Minnelli’s overwrought imagery craft something unique.

Whether that “unique” is a positive or negative depends largely on the viewer. For me, I’ve long been fascinated and enthralled by The Pirate’s dream space Caribbean and overcharged erotic allure. I’m part of the cult that thinks this is a musical underdog just waiting for everyone else to take notice of its brilliance and vault it out of its limbo state. Others are not quite as forgiving of the patchwork plot and hyperbolic artistry.

There’s Garland’s quivering good girl just aching to go bad at the guiding hand of Macoco, the scourge of the Caribbean seas. Her first meeting with Kelly, a meet-cute flirtation, finds her practically vibrating with repressed sexual desire and Kelly turning up the sleazy charm. Garland’s legs are practically locked together at the vaguest change in vaginal humidity, and one can’t blame her as Kelly’s tanned seducer slides up to her.

Kelly’s a proud cock on display. His performance registers as something of either a parody or homage to John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks’ pirate roles and hammy theatrics, and a display of his thick, muscular body. The costumer outfits Kelly in pants and tights that look as if they were painted on, and he’s never looked more alluring than he does here. Kelly was never more erotically charged and open a star than he was during the pirate ballet, the masterpiece sequence of the film, where he becomes the object of the camera’s desire in a way that is typically reserved for female stars.

This ballet sequence highlights his powerful thighs, arm muscles, and athletic dancing just as much as it functions as an elaborate erotic fever dream from Garland’s chaste good girl. He brandishes a sword throughout, and yep, it’s completely loaded with Freudian metaphor. Kelly and Garland generate heat in The Pirate, and this fantasy ballet exemplifies that this no sweetly pure romance story like Kelly and Garland’s other films, such as Summer Stock.

Awash in dreamy reds, purples, and then speed towards an ending run of sequences that seem at odds with the rest of the film. “Be a Clown,” first performed in a leg destroying routine with Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers then reprised with Garland and Kelly in pure slapstick mode, feels like an imposition from a more routine MGM production. It’s a remarkable and strange film nonetheless, one that’s psychologically complex in the ways it juxtaposes its characters interior realities with the fussily designed exterior. The Pirate is a fascinating, complex film that feels alternately designed for cult worship and begging for rediscovery as a damaged jewel in everyone’s oeuvre.   

The last of their four musical films together, Girl Crazy takes an established property and has Mickey and Judy playing honest-to-goodness characters rather than taking their established personas and building around that. Girl Crazy ends up being one of their strongest films for it. Of course, the Gershwin songbook certainly didn’t hurt.

Based on the stage show of the same name, however fast and loose, Girl Crazy finds Rooney playing an idle rich boy on the decent side of naughty that gets packed away to school out west after one too many bad headlines by his wealthy father. Rooney’s monied character is basically a decent sort that has to learn that there’s more to life than immediate gratification, and Garland’s just the girl to teach him that lesson. Opposites repel and attraction, there’s some misunderstandings and lessons along the way, and we stop every so often for another song-and-dance number.

Yes, Girl Crazy is pure formula, but what a formula! It never overstays its welcome, everything works, there’s some fun supporting players (Nancy Walker as sour to Garland’s sweet, in particular), and a number of knockout musical scenes. Hell, Girl Crazy even offers Rooney another chance to riff and whip out a series of impressions in order to lift Garland’s spirits, and the audience’s by extension.

Who cares if the plot’s nearly transparent when you’ve got June Allyson, in one of her first films, bringing her manic girl-next-door energy to “Treat Me Rough” or Garland breaking your heart during the “But Not for Me” chorus? Girl Crazy works so well because all the parts work with the smooth efficiency of a Swiss watch. Of course, something as dreamy and romantic as the sight of Garland and Charles Walters slow dancing in “Embraceable You” will tend to patch over any problems with predictability.

The absence of Busby Berkeley ironically helps matters as Garland seems more relaxed and natural here, and Rooney doesn’t dominate in the same way he did during Babes in Arms or Babes on Broadway. Their pairing feels more equitable here and they manage to give as good as they get. “Could You Use Me?” finds the pair engaging as mature adults primed for romantic and sexual coupling, and it’s a contrast to more chaste flirtations of their previous three films together.

While Norman Taurog’s direction manages to find the human element in many of the musical sequences, it’s the finale, “I Got Rhythm,” that one remembers. Berkeley’s final production number, “I Got Rhythm” finds cowboys and cowgirls line dancing, marching, firing pistols, and doing rope tricks. The entire thing is a surreal, overripe jewel that functions as the perfect cherry on top of Girl Crazy’s already tasty dessert. His presence isn’t necessarily missed during the rest of the film, Garland strongly disliked him, but he manages to go out with a bang.

As “I Got Rhythm” ends Girl Crazy with a loud pop (mostly from pistols), so too does this film mark the end of Mickey and Judy as a big screen duo. They would share the screen one last time during a scene in Words and Music, but this would prove their final merry-go-round as co-stars. For me, this is probably their strongest film as a pair with Garland’s dramatic talents ripening, Rooney knowing when to scale back or go big, and the uniformly strongest score of them all. Girl Crazy is a carefree musical fueled by the towering achievements of its consummate stars.

The weakest of the four “let’s put on a show” musicals Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made; Babes on Broadway ironically also contains some of the best individual materials of the four films. But there’s no getting around a few simple facts: Babes on Broadway is too long and convoluted, and the minstrel show sequence finale is such a sour note that it nearly negates everything that came before it. At least they’re not in blackface for the fadeout performance of the title song.

This one really amplifies the reoccurring theme of Rooney as an oily hustler who will do anything to succeed and get ahead. He will be humbled by his experiences in this story, of course, and become worthy of Garland’s love and admiration. Garland gets more of a spine here by letting Rooney know that his machinations and betrayals have hurt her.

This downbeat tone causes a lot of Babes on Broadway to play like a film from a decade prior. It’d be easy to imagine the basics of this story and these characters plopped into a Depression-era musical, like a family-friendly 42^nd Street. The whole thing either peps up or drags down depending on any individual scene, but a persistent bitterness remains. The fun of watching Mickey and Judy put on a show to save someone/something is leeched out ever so slowly here.

Along the way towards that complicated finale, Babes on Broadway manages to provide some bravura sequences. There’s the “Hoe Down,” one of Busby Berkeley’s geometric and complicated sequences that’s obviously taxing on the performers but sold entirely by their ability to make it look as easy as walking. “How About You?” is Mickey and Judy doing a Fred and Ginger meet-cute turned duet around her apartment. “Chin Up! Cheerio! Carry On!” is a morale booster as Judy nearly single-handedly does her part for the special relationship by singing about how much America supports Britain while it was going through the blitz.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the hilarious sight of Rooney doing an impression of Carmen Miranda in “Mama Yo Quiero.” Yes, he’s in full drag and doing a highly credible imitation of her performing style before ending it on a jokey scream of “Mama!” Rooney, Richard Quine, and Ray McDonald burn the house down during “Anything Can Happen in New York” for an appreciative Fay Bainter. The highlight of the film is Vincente Minnelli’s ghost theater sequence where Rooney and Garland imitate stage stars of the past, including George M. Cohan and Sarah Bernhardt.

If there’s so much good, then why is Babes on Broadway so low in my estimation? Because it’s all bits and pieces that never quite cohere into anything stronger. It’s getting to these set pieces that takes some doing as the connective tissue is plagued with awkward performances and tonal issues. Richard Quine is fine, Ray McDonald is there, Virginia Weidler is a child actress I never much cared for. She’s all awkward dancing and outshined by the depth of talent of her main co-stars here. Hell, Margaret O’Brien’s cinematic debut, a blink-and-miss it cameo where she delivers a hilariously melodramatic and morbid joke audition, blows her out of the water.

It’s nearly impossible to talk about Babes on Broadway without circling back to that blackface finale, so no sense in prolonging the inevitable. Its presence is bad enough, but its introduction is so shiny and happy that it somehow makes it all even worse. It just keeps going on and on as Berkeley is clearly enamored with the blackface makeup contrasting with the all-white costumes and assembling them in various shapes and patterns. There’s some good technique and astounding images here, but what you’re looking and what they’re in service towards winds up being a net negative.