The Champ is Back

Wallace Beery memorably won an Oscar for playing the father to Jackie Cooper in The Champ. Beery had a similar role, also opposite Cooper, in O'Shaughnessy's Boy.

Beery plays Michael O'Shaughnessy, nicknamed Windy. He's a big-cat tamer in a traveling circus, and he's got a bizarre idea for a trick in which a tiger will climb up on the back of an elephant and the two animals will go together through a ring of fire. But in the meantime, he's got a wife Cora (Leona Miracle) who is a trapeze artist with some emotional problems of their own. Together, the two have a son Joseph (played in the first half by Spanky McFarland), whom Windy has nicknamed Stubby.

Stubby loves his father, who at heart is trying to be a good person. But this being the circus, there's a lot of drinking and carousing going on, and this results in Windy returning to the family's trailer drunk on more than one occasion. Cora is growing tired of this, and has brought in her thoroughly nasty sister Martha (Sara Haden) to deal with it. Martha hates windy, and keeps putting ideas into Cora's head that she should take the kid and leave her husband.

Eventually Cora does, also clearing out the couple's joint bank account with the circus. Windy is despondent to the point that he loses his confidence, and when he tries to train one of the tigers to get on top of that elephant, he fails, with the tiger mauling him Siegfried and Roy style and costing Windy one of his arms. He leaves the circus and turns further to drink, trying to find his wife and kid.

Eventually, his old cirus comes back to town, and the boss, Dan Hastings (Willard Robertson) offers to help Windy find his son. It turns out that Cora kept up with the trapeze act but died in an accident during a performance. So Aunt Martha got custody of Joseph, and put the kid in a military academy. It's all Windy can do to get temporary custody of the kid for three months as a sort of trial to see whether he should get permanent custody of Joseph.

Joseph doesn't really remember his father, instead only knowing what Aunt Martha has told him about Dad. That, needless to say, is about as negative as you can imagine, so Joseph (now played by Cooper) hates his father too and doesn't really want to spend a summer with the circus. Windy tries evrything he can to earn his son's respect and love, but it doesn't seem to be working well.

With Windy also being back with the Hastings circus, Hastings wants Windy to do that tiger and elephant act, but Windy finds that every time he tries to get near the tiger, he loses his confidence, and the tiger knows it. Amazingly enough, however, Joseph has a beatific smile that seems to have a calming effect on the tiger and might enable Windy to do the act after all. But on the night they're supposed to go live with it, Aunt Martha shows up again....

O'Shaughnessy's Boy looks like little more than a programmer for Wallace Beery, pairing him with Cooper again because of the success of their previous movies together. The story is somewhat implausible but does mostly hold together, thanks in part to competent acting by both of the leads. Haden is also quite good as the really nasty aunt. Although O'Shaughnessy's Boy is nothing special, it's certainly worth checking out whenever the next time is that it shows up on TCM.

As one of the MGM movies that's part of the old Turner Library, O'Shaughnessy's Boy has also unsurprisingly received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.