Mickey Rooney, RIP

Mickey Rooney died yesterday. Variety

says the actor was 93 when he passed away, but if you told me
he was 113 I might have believed you; there comes a point when you
just figure that impish old man is immortal and stop keeping track
of his age.

The movies that made Rooney famous, on the other hand, were
built around watching his character grow up. The Andy Hardy series,
which MGM produced from 1937 to 1946, feels like an in
utero version of the family sitcoms that started cropping up
on TV a decade later, from the small-town setting to the
loving-but-stern father whose advice guides his son toward the
right decisions. (The movies were also a direct inspiration for
Archie
Comics, though the Archie stories evolved in a different
direction.) In the early films, you even have that eternal curse of
the sitcom, the far-too-precious child actor: Rooney mugged
shamelessly in the first few installments of the series, though
eventually he toned it down a notch and added some nuance to his
performance.

Between that hammy acting and
the frequently formulaic plots, it’s easy to underestimate these
movies. But there are lyrical little moments in them that can catch
you by surprise. Consider Love
Finds Andy Hardy (1938), with its intertwined tales of
Andy Hardy juggling girlfriends and trying to get his own car. It
isn’t exactly scintillating stuff, though if you’re a fan of
Freudian subtexts you’ll be glued to the screen. But then, about an
hour into the picture, there’s a quietly engrossing amateur-radio
sequence, a wonderful little moment that belongs in the syllabus of
any class on the prehistory of cyberspace.

Or take
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940). It’s a fairly ordinary
picture, good but not overwhelming, until a strangely haunting
scene where Rooney kisses Judy Garland and she starts to cry.
“Betsy’s tears, the most affecting moment in all of the Andy Hardy
movies, seem to issue from absent circumstances, from a different
scene which has disappeared,” Robert B. Ray writes in
The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. “Their power to
disturb derives initially from Garland’s acting, more realistically
expressive than this B-series can bear.”

The best of the Andy Hardy movies is not, strictly speaking, an
Andy Hardy movie at all.
The Human Comedy (1943) stars Rooney as a teenaged
telegraph messenger in California during World War II. He isn’t
Andy Hardy, but of course if you cast Mickey Rooney as a small-town
kid in 1943, audiences are going to think of Andy as they watch.
But now Rooney isn’t mugging for the camera at all, and now he
finds himself bringing people news of their sons and brothers dying
in World War II. The first draft of the script was written by
William Saroyan, a self-described “spiritual anarchist” who
despised war, giving the movie a somewhat different flavor than the
standard World War II propaganda picture. It’s sentimental
stuff—too sentimental, really—but like a lot of homefront stories
it has a certain darkness to it; its celebration of community pulls
its power from the fact that the community is being ruptured by the
battles overseas. That, and the fact that it’s Judge Hardy’s boy
who’s delivering tidings of death.

The anti–Human Comedy
is
Andy Hardy Comes Home, a 1958 flop that tried to revive
the series. This time, instead of delivering news of military
deaths, Rooney delivers a scheme for military production. Andy
Hardy has become a middle-aged lawyer working for a Santa Monica
aircraft company, and he wants to bring a missile-parts factory to
his old hometown. It’s a disorienting picture to watch: It feels
like one of those made-for-TV movies where the cast of some ancient
sitcom reunites decades after the fact—a
Return to Mayberry or Still the Beaver
for the Hardy series—except it’s set in the late ’50s, a time when
The Andy Griffith Show didn’t exist yet and Leave It
to Beaver was just getting started. Instead of nostalgia for
the ’50s, we get nostalgia in the ’50s. But that wistful
pining for the old days is braided into a script that keeps
assuring us how great it will be if the military-industrial complex
descends on a Midwestern small town. The result is an awkward mix
of backward-looking nostalgia and forward-looking technocracy. As a
movie, it’s pretty terrible; as a cultural artifact, it’s pretty
interesting.

That was it for Andy Hardy but not for Mickey Rooney. With the
series finished, he still had more than a half-century’s worth of
voiceover parts and character roles ahead of him. But it’s those
early movies that define his work for me: unpretentious little
pictures that might not seem to offer much but sometimes deliver
far more than they promise.