Posted on 09/09/2008 6:57:53 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Father Flanagan’s Boystown, a model community near Omaha which has helped solve the problems of 5,000 problem boys in the twenty years of its existence, probably never had such a tough little mugg on its guest list as Mickey (Himself) Rooney, who plays Juvenile Delinquent No. 1 in the Metro film of “Boys Town” at the Capitol. Mickey is the Dead End gang rolled into one. He’s Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and King Kong before they grew up or knew a restraining hand. Mickey, as the French would understate it, is the original enfant terrible.
Mickey’s descent upon Boys Town is frightening to behold. It wasn’t – the way the picture sees it – as though Father Flanagan’s project had been firmly established. Boys Town still was in the experimental, heavily mortgaged, cynically viewed stage where any ill-wind might have blown it off the Nebraskan map. And Mickey blew in like a hurricane, a pack of butts in his left-hand pocket, a deck of cards in his right, a Tenth Avenue Homburg cocked over one ear and his mind made up to blow the joint the minute the Dominie’s back was turned.
“Boys Town” gets off to a grand start and it keeps its evenly interesting stride so long as Mickey remains the fresh little mug with his guard up against Spencer Tracy’s Father Flanagan and the other refining influences of the home. It loses ground and never entirely regains it when the script writers discover they have made Mickey too tough a nut to crack except by resorting to artificial plot leverage. The highway accident involving Pee Wee, his little chum; the bank robbery and kidnapping, the flood of fears in the last reel, strike a too familiar discord.
It manages, in spite of the embarrassing sentimentality of its closing scenes, to be a consistently interesting and frequently touching motion picture. The Boys Town theme, with its firm basis in fact, is dramatic enough. Spencer Tracy’s performance of Father Flanagan – like Spencer Tracy’s performances of almost any one – is perfection itself and the most eloquent tribute to the Nebraska priest. Besides Mickey, there are other clever youngsters –Frankie Thomas, Bobs Watson, Mickey Rentachler, Sidney Miller among them – and players like Henry Hull, Leslie Fenton and Edward Norris to do all that a cast can do in crating a good entertainment.
Try to find a swim club these days that offers sterilized salt water for $0.40.
I hope you didn’t stop lurking just to make that post.
Ya mean that yarn didn’t bring a swell of tears to your eyes?
But check the fine print. For discount admission, a child had to be under 14 but taller than 52 inches. A fairly limited population, particularly at the tail end of the depression.
1938 Movie review...
Interesting to see what made a good movie then.
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