One of the better Andy Hardy movies with Andy getting ready to go off to college. It just skims along the water with ease. A little drama and comedy all mixed up like a fruit cocktail. Mickey Rooney gives a terrific performance which may sound strange when talking about an Andy Hardy film but it is comical, serious and subtle at times. His facial expressions are so natural. It must have felt very odd to him to be playing an 18-year old going off to college and finally becoming a man when he had just married Ava Gardner. There are a bunch of plots in this and they all cause trouble for Andy.
He is trying to sell his jalopy to a group of friends for $20 in order to pay for someone to drive his car from NYC to his hometown of Carville. $20 sure went a long ways back then. But his friends can't come up with the money and his check will bounce unless he figures out a way to cover it. Then his father (Lewis Stone) plans on going to college with Andy and staying a month and introducing him to all his old friends there. Egads. Andy has to get out of that. No one wants their old man hanging out with them at college. On top of that his father is trying to decide on a case involving a young boy on a wagon crashing into a truck. The young boy is Robert Blake during his days in Our Gang. Baretta was a long ways away. Andy is trying to help the boy's widowed mother.
Then there is of course love trouble. Times two. His regular Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) wants to get things going again and she wants to introduce Andy to her friend who is visiting. Andy meets her by the pool. She kisses him. Tells him she is a psyche major. "I don't know what that is but I think I like it". He invites her to a party. "A giraffe party". Huh? You know. Necking. She then goes underwater and he joins her but sadly she doesn't perform a musical routine. Because this was the debut of Esther Williams - three times swimming champion and future swimming star. MGM liked having their young starlets debut in this series and see how they do. She clearly passed. At some point Andy thinks he has promised them both that he will marry them. From psychology to bigamy he says. And on top of her we get Mantan Moreland as the Benedict's butler.
I always enjoy the oldfangled hip language back then. One exchange with his father goes like this. Father "I thought I was up to date when I learned a girl was droopy or a sad apple". Andy "You no longer refer to a haggy bag as mealy droopy. She is either shot, short or shapeless". The film ends on a really warm sweet family note and Andy is on his way. He spots a suitcase going to his college and immediately makes a play for the girl - "excuse my boner". Clearly meant something else back then! She is played by Susan Peters who had a good career going till she was accidentally shot in the spine three years after this.
Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble (1944) – 5.0
I am getting near the end of the Andy Hardy series - only two left and one was made years later - and Andy (Mickey Rooney) is getting more annoying all the time. You want him to just shut up in this one and stop mugging to the camera. As innocent as these films were for their time, this one would be verbotten today. Andy tries kissing anything that moves in a feminine manner and a student kisses her professor and he likes it. It takes Judge Hardy as usual to calm everyone down and teach a few moral lessons. Lewis Stone who plays the Judge is perfect. One of the great character actors back then.
It took till the 14th film before Andy finally goes off to college and leaves the Judge, mom (Faye Holden) and Milly (Sara Holden) behind. Mom goes into hysterics of course but the Judge is happy that Andy is going to the same school he went to. It takes Andy about 2 minutes on the train to hit on two - or actually three - girls. His come on line is the clever "You are the most beautiful girl in the world". Maybe it worked in high school but not so well in college. One of the girls is played by Bonita Granville of Nancy Drew fame. The Nancy Drew series was only six years before this one but damn, has she matured. She looks to be in her mid-20s while actually 21 and Rooney is 24 but still looks 16. They don't match up well but this is the movies where anything is possible.
The other girl is played by Lee Wilde or is it Lyn Wilde? Twins as cute as a bumble bee buzzing around honey. One a total flirt, the other like a morning chill. Andy doesn't realize there are two of them and can't figure out why the girl is sweet on him one second and a freezer the next. The two of them were to appear in six films together. Then there is the older man who seems interested in Bonita and this pisses off Andy. He is played by the suave Herbert Marshall. This is all on the trip on the train to the campus. The blonde twins chisel him out of most of his money and Bonita and Marshall get off a stop early. Poor Andy. More misery ahead. And he deserves it all.
Keye Luke has a small but nice role here as a doctor tending to the Judge. When he meets the Judge, he tells him how amiable he is unless someone makes a Confucius crack. When he goes to the Hardy residence, the mother opens the door and is in shock. A Chinese man! I guess they don't get a lot of them in Carvel. "Do you speak English?" "As good as anyone from Brooklyn does". Still amazing that after 13 of these, they haven't fallen into B films - 107 minutes long and still very popular.
Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1946) – 6.0
This is the final film in the Andy Hardy series and a sense of melancholy surrounds it. It was the 15th film that began in 1937 and ended with this one (there was another made 12 years later in an attempt to re-start the series but by then Lewis Stone has passed away and the heart of the series was the relationship between father and son and without that it wasn't the same). Mickey Rooney was 17 when the series began but looked much younger and in fact in this film he could still pass for a college student though now he was 26 and had been married to and divorced from Ava Gardner.
The films were always a mix of comedy, drama and small town homilies and common sense. Andy would get into a mess and his father would deliver a loving lecture on growing up and taking responsibility. And always forgive. They were enormously popular. The family with two loving parents, a sister, an aunt, a series of girlfriends and Andy in the center. At the end of this film the Aunt jokingly puts out on a table the photos of all of Andy's girls during the years - Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Esther Williams, Ann Rutherford and others. It is a touching moment. A way of saying goodbye.
As in real life for Rooney, Andy gets out of the army after two years. The film opens with a photo of him on the wall in uniform. Then the door bell rings and it is a telegram. During the war years that was a terrifying moment because that is how the War Office notified families that their son had been killed. But it is just that Andy was coming home. The war was over. He plans on going back to college and then law school. But first marriage. To a girl from the previous film, Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble in 1944. She is played by Bonita Granville. What plays out stabs Andy in the heart. The series doesn't end in victory or celebration, just Andy learning another lesson from his father. And he goes on. As with all of these old film series that I have seen over the past few years, I feel a bit sad when I come to the end but also relieved.
Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958) – 6.0
This is really the final Andy Hardy film and it is waist deep in sentimentality and nostalgia. It is a fitting ending to the series. In reality, the official series ended 12-years earlier in 1946 with Andy out of the army and back home - off to college where his heart is broken one more time. There was no sense though of finality to it. I am not sure why Love Laughs at Andy Hardy was the last film in the series. All fifteen of them from 1937 to 1946 had been profitable and very popular. Mickey Rooney who played Andy was often voted the most popular actor in America. Perhaps he wanted to move on. Maybe MGM did. But 12 years later a script was put together and brought to Rooney to see if he would do it. After that final Hardy film, Rooney tried changing his image with some tough characters - Killer McCoy, Quicksand, The Strip - close to B films and he never came close to the popularity of his Hardy films or his collaborations with Judy Garland. He was also in the process of divorcing his fourth wife - Ava Gardner and Martha Vickers had been two of the earlier ones - and was about to marry his fifth. So, he said sure. So did MGM with the hopes that this would springboard another series. The ending says "To Be Continued".
It wasn't. Maybe Andy Hardy didn't play as well in 1958. Its family values and cornpone were of a different age. It didn't do much at the box office and that was that. But perhaps just as well because it is the perfect ending to a much-loved series and beloved characters. Fay Holdren returns as his mother - she was in all but the first one. Aunt Milly is back as well with Sara Haden. Even Cecilia Parker as his sister comes out of retirement to be a part of it. Sadly though, Lewis Stone as his father had died a few years previously and only his large portrait in his study looking down on his family is there to remind us. The series was famous for the young actresses that it brought on for MGM to test. The film has flashbacks to three of them who had become huge stars - Judy Garland, Esther Williams and Lana Turner. Pure nostalgia. Rooney had tried to get the actress Ann Rutherford who played his old girlfriend to play his wife but she wanted too much money. Too bad. That would have been sweet. The tall lug is played by Johnny Weissmuller's son.
It is a serviceable script with a fine ending - but it is really just the sense of being back in Carville and the Hardy home with mom pestering and worrying about her son, Aunt Milly about and Andy once again getting in over his head that matters. It is the exact same set in the home as before. Whether MGM was saving it or rebuilt it, I don't know but it is just right. Andy has clearly been away for years when he comes back to try and buy some property for the company he works for in California. He has a wife and two children - the son is played by one of his real children and looks a hell of a lot like Rooney did at that age. Everybody he meets either knows him or says their parents do. Things don't go as planned and he may lose his job and then he recalls advice from his father as he stares at his portrait - fight. No matter what, fight. As corny an ending as you could imagine but why not. It's Andy Hardy.
