The Fabulous Forties #45: Love Laughs At Andy Hardy (dir by Willis Goldbeck)

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I cringed a little when I saw that the 45th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1946’s Love Laughs At Andy Hardy.

This was because I had never seen an Andy Hardy film before but I did know enough to know that, starting in the 1930s, MGM made a series of films that featured Mickey Rooney in the role of a “nice, young man” named Andy Hardy. Andy was a well-meaning kid who grew up in Middle America under the watchful eye of his father, Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone). What little I had heard of the Andy Hardy films led me to suspect that they were very much a product of their time and had not aged particularly well.

Having now watched Love Laughs At Andy Hardy … well, I can confirm that it is a product of its time. And it is definitely an uneven film, though perhaps I would have felt differently if I had seen any of the other Andy Hardy films. (Love Laughs was the 15th film about Andy Hardy and it pretty much assumes that the viewer already knows who Andy and all of his friends and family are.) But I will say this: Mickey Rooney was a really good actor. In fact, as I watched Love Laughs At Andy Hardy, I was shocked by just how good a performance Rooney gave. When I think of Mickey Rooney — well, to be honest, it’s rare that I ever do. But when I do, it’s usually in relation to the exploitation films he made after he was a star. These were movies like The Manipulator or Silent Night Deadly Night 5, all of which feature an elderly and obviously unwell Mickey acting up a storm. In contrast to those film, in Love Laughs At Andy Hardy, Mickey gives a totally empathetic and, at times, even subtle performance. Even by contemporary standards, his performance feels real and, as I watched, I started to understand how there actually could have been 16 separate films about Andy Hardy. You really do find yourself caring about the little guy,

As for this film, it opens with Andy returning from serving in World War II. Apparently, he left college to enlist in the army. Now that he’s back in America, he’s ready to return to college and ask his old girlfriend, Kay (Bonita Granville) to marry him. However, to Andy’s shock and disappointment, Kay has moved on and has other plans. Why, it’s almost enough to make Andy want to drop out of school, give up his dreams of becoming an attorney, and try to find work as an engineer in South America!

Fortunately, Judge Hardy is there to talk some sense into his son.

It’s all fairly predictable and, as I said before, definitely uneven. I get the feeling that a lot of the scenes in Love Laughs At Andy Hardy were meant to serve as call backs to previous films in the series. Watching this film without a context can lead to a lot of confusion. But, again, it’s all saved by Mickey Rooney’s performance. While I can’t really give this film a strong recommendation, I imagine if you’re fan of Rooney’s or the Andy Hardy films, you’ll enjoy it.

Perhaps the best scene in the film comes when Andy is set up on a blind date with a girl named Coffy (Dorothy Ford). When Andy goes to Coffy’s dorm to pick her up, he can’t understand why all the other girls keep looking at him and laughing. However, once Coffy shows up, it quickly becomes obvious. Coffy is 6’2 while Andy is a full foot shorter.

However, when Andy and Coffy arrive at the college dance, they defy all the laughs and the snide remarks. Instead of surrendering to the expectations of snarky society, they perform a dance to end all dances and I’m going to conclude this review by sharing it below.

Enjoy!

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Pride of the Yankees (dir by Sam Wood)

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“People all say that I’ve had a bad break. But today … today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”

— Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) at the end of The Pride of the Yankees (1943)

After airing Foreign Correspondent earlier tonight, TCM followed up by showing the 1943 best picture nominee, The Pride of the Yankees. Knowing that Pride of the Yankees was going to be a baseball film and that I know next to nothing about baseball, I recruited my sister, the Dazzling Erin, to watch the movie with me. Erin loves baseball and I knew that she would be able to explain anything that went over my head.

Well, I absolutely loved watching this movie with my sister but it turns out that The Pride of the Yankees isn’t really much of a baseball movie. True, it’s about a real life baseball player. Several actual players appeared as themselves. About 85% of the film’s dialogue deals with baseball and probably about 70% of the film features characters playing some form of the game. But the film never goes into any great detail about baseball or how it’s played. There’s no talk of strategy or rules or deeper meaning or anything else. Going into the film, I knew that baseball was a game that involved throwing, swinging bats, and running. And it turns out that was all that I needed to know.

The Pride of the Yankees is less about baseball and more about celebrity. It’s a biopic of Lou Gehrig, who today is best known for his battle with ALS, a disease that is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Lou Gehrig died on June 2, 1941 and The Pride of the Yankees was released just a year later. Watching the film, it’s obvious that Gehrig was a beloved figure, the type of celebrity who, if he were alive today, would probably be the center of stories like, “Lou Gehrig Did Something This Weekend And It Was Perfect.” Watching the film, it easy to imagine how traumatic it must have been for the nation when a beloved athlete like Lou Gehrig died at the age of 37.

As a result, The Pride of the Yankees is less a biopic and more a case for canonization. From the minute that the film’s Lou Gehrig appears on-screen, he is presented as being the type of saintly athlete who, by promising to hit two home runs in one game, inspires a crippled child to walk. Lou is modest, kind, unpretentious, and never gets angry. Over the course of the film, he takes care of his mother, displays a worthy work ethic, and marries Eleanor. He and Eleanor have a perfect marriage without a single argument or a hint of trouble, except for the fact that Lou sometimes gets so busy playing baseball with the local children that he’s late coming home. There’s not a hint of sadness in their life, until Lou suddenly gets sick.

And really, it should not work. If ever there’s ever been a film that should be painfully out-of-place in our more cynical times, it would be The Pride of the Yankees. However, the film still works because Lou is played by Gary Cooper and Eleanor is played by Teresa Wright. These two excellent performers bring their considerable talents to making overly sentimental scenes feel credible. Gary Cooper was 40 years old when he made The Pride of the Yankees and there’s a few scenes — especially the ones where Lou is supposed to be a student at Columbia University — where Cooper is clearly too old for the role. But, for the most part, Gary Cooper did a great job as Lou Gehrig. Cooper is especially memorable when Lou first starts to show signs of being ill. Watching Lou struggle to swing a bat, I was reminded of a horse struggling to stand on an injured leg. It was almost painfully poignant.

The Pride of the Yankees was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture. However, it lost to another sentimental film that featured Teresa Wright, Mrs. Miniver.

Netflix Noir #1: Crime Against Joe (dir by Lee Sholem)

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After watching Inherent Vice last weekend, I decided to get on Netflix and do a search for film noirs. This led to me watching four film noirs from the 50s, all of which were previously unknown to me.

For my first Netflix Noir, I watched a little something called Crime Against Joe. It’s a 69 minute film from 1956. It’s about a guy named Joe. There’s been a crime. Oddly enough, the crime really against Joe. Instead, he’s been wrongly accused of committing a crime against a nightclub singer named Irene. So, perhaps a better title for this film would have been It Sucks To Be Joe.

But anyway —

Crime Against Joe was directed by Lee Sholem. According to Wikipedia, Lee Sholem had a 40 year career as a director. During that time, he directed over 1,300 television episodes and feature films and he finished every single one of them either on time or early. And you can certainly see evidence of that in Crime Against Joe, a film that starts out in a rush and pretty much never slows down until the final fade out.

Joe (John Bromfeld) was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school but — surprise! surprise! — he’s failed to live up to the expectations set for him by the 1945 yearbook. Instead, he enlisted in the army, served in the Korean War, and was diagnosed with “battle fatigue.” (I assume that battle fatigue was the 1950s version of PTSD.) He spent a while in a mental hospital and it was there that he first started painting. When he was released, he moved in with his widowed mother (Frances Morris). While she works to support him, Joe spends his time drinking and painting.

As the movie begins, a drunken Joe has just destroyed his latest painting. (“I can see it in my head but it doesn’t come out on canvas!” Joe shouts, which is actually a pretty good way to describe the dark feeling that all artists occasionally get.) He wanders around town, drunk. He talks to a waitress named Slacks (Julie London), who is obviously in love with him. He gets some sage advice from Red (Henry Calvin), a taxi driver. He stumbles into a nightclub where he harasses a singer (Alika Louis) before finally getting thrown out of the club. In the parking lot, as he stumbles away, a mysterious cowboy (Rhodes Reason) glares at him.

Joe stumbles about until, around two in the morning, he runs into a young woman wearing a nightgown. He tries to talk to her but she only stares at him, her placid face frozen in a zombie-like state. Joe leads her to a nearby house where the woman’s father thanks him for his help and then slams the door in his face.

Later that night, the nightclub singer is found dead on the side of the road. Found near her body is a high school pin that belonged to someone from the class of 1945. Knowing that Joe was drunk that night and had been seen in the nightclub, Detective Hollander (Robert Keys) goes to Joe’s house. Hollander demands to see Joe’s high school pin. Joe says he doesn’t know where it is. Hollander stares at Joe’s paintings. “You always paint half-naked women?” Hollander sneers before arresting Joe for murder.

At the station, Joe says that he was leading the woman back to her house at the same time that the singer was murdered. The woman’s father shows up at the police station. No, he says, Joe was nowhere near his house at two in the morning. Joe is arrested for murder…

Fortunately, Slacks is willing to risk her life to prove that Joe is innocent. And Joe knows that the murderer had to have been someone who he went to high school with…

Crime Against Joe is one of those low-budget, obscure B-movies that actually a lot more interesting than you might think. John Bromfeld does a good job as Joe and the character’s PSTD gives the film a bit more depth than you might otherwise expect. Julie London is great in the role of brave and selfless Slacks (though it’s interesting that this film felt the need to give a masculine nickname to a strong female character) and Rhodes Reason is genuinely menacing as the mysterious cowboy. Crime Against Joe is also full of unexpected and occasionally surreal details. The most obvious example would be the zombie-like woman who Joe runs into on the night of the murder. However, my favorite little oddity is the fact that signs reading “Corey for Councilman” keep popping up in the strangest locations.

(It eventually turns out that Joe went to high school with Corey and the scene where Joe confronts his old classmate is a fun little piece of political satire. That said, there was a part of me that hoped the significance of the sings would just remain an odd and unexplained little detail.)

There’s actually a surprisingly subversive streak running through Crime Against Joe. We usually tend to think of the 50s as being a time when authority figures (like the police) were viewed with blind trust. In Crime Against Joe, however, nobody in power is portrayed positively. The police, for instance, come across like a bunch of close-minded bullies who are prepared to convict Joe based solely on his paintings and his less-than-sterling war record. The scenes where Hollander interrogates Joe are full of menace. In the end, this film is on the side of those living on the margins of respectable society. When Joe and Slacks try to prove Joe’s innocence, they’re also attempting to prove their own right to exist in a society that has rejected both of them.

Crime Against Joe may not be a well-known film but there’s a lot more going on under its surface than you might originally think. It’s on Netflix so check it out when you’ve got 70 minutes to spare.