TCM Star of the Month December 2024: Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney (l.) as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Dec. 5, 8:00 PM)

We're into a new month, which means that it's once again time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out it's Mickey Rooney, who was likely selected because, as an MGM contract player for close to 20 years, a lot of his movies are in the old Turner Library and, I'd guess, easier (and cheaper) to license to show on TCM. I'm posting this a bit early because, unlike a lot of Stars of the Month, Rooney's movies aren't limited to prime time. Often when that happens, the salute will start in prime time, and continue into the morning of the following day. This month, however, the movies are starting on Thursday mornings, and continuing through Thursdays in prime time. There's also only the four weeks because if TCM had wanted to do five nights, one of the nights would have come in the run-up to Christmas, and TCM presumably wanted to prioritize its annual Christmas marathon.

Mickey Rooney with Maureen O'Sullivan in Hide-Out (Dec. 5, 1:30 PM)

Anyhow, the salute to Rooney kicks off tomorrow (Dec. 5) at 6:00 AM with Rooney in a small, uncredited role in Beast of the City, a movie I'm pretty certain I've seen, but which a search of the blog says I haven't done a full-length post on before. So I've still got some Turner Library movies to record at least. The rest of tomorrow's daytime schedule includes more juvenile roles. Rooney basically is only in the opening scene or two of Manhattan Melodrama (Dec. 5, 3:00 PM), but has a slightly bigger part in a movie I really love, Hide-Out (Dec. 5, 1:30 PM).

Mickey Rooney in a promotional still with Judy Garland; I guessed when I first found this picture that it's from Babes on Broadway (Dec. 20, 12:15 AM), but your guess is as good as mine

I don't see any particularly noteworthy theme in the movies that TCM is running on Dec. 12, but prime time on December 19 looks to be entirely movies that feature both Rooney and Judy Garland. Finally, December 26 brings the Andy Hardy movies, I think all of them, which includes the late 1950s coda Andy Hardy Comes Home (Dec. 27, 7:15 AM). Also worth mentioning is a double feature on Dec. 12 of The Human Comedy (10:15 PM) followed by Boys Town (Dec. 13, 12:15 AM). Note, however, that Boys Town may start a few minutes late since The Human Comedy is listed as a 118-minute movie in a two-hour slot that's bound to have an intro and outro. Boys Town is only 96 minutes in a 105-minute slot, so the schedule would definitely catch up by 2:00 AM.

Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in Boys Town (Dec. 13, 12:15 AM)

Introducing George Hamilton

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was Crime and Punishment, USA. I finally got around to watching it, and now you get the review.

When you seem the title, you might think of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel Crime and Punishment. You'd be right, as the opening credits state it's based on the novel. Those opening credits also give a credit "Introducing George Hamilton", getting a screen all to himself. Hamilton plays Robert Cole, the renamed version of the Raskolnikov character from the book. Also, the action is moved from Saint Petersburg to then-contemporary (the movie was released in 1959) Los Angeles and makes the Raskolnikov character a sort of beatnik.

If you don't know the story of Crime and Punishment, at least it's one that's easy to put into a one- or two-sentence synopsis. Raskolnikov/Cole (to be referred to as Cole for the rest of the post since that's the character name in the movie) kills an elderly pawnbroker woman in part because he believes in a philosophy that says killing can be morally acceptable when it's for some higher moral good. (Somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in that manner.) But Cole has a conscience, and the police are able to use that against him to get him to confess.

Indeed, we see foreshadowing of that conscience at the very beginning of the movie. The police are coming to arrest the pawnbroker's killer, except that they've got the wrong man. This draws a crowd of people, of whom Cole is one. But Cole collapses at the sight of the wrong man being taken away, and is brought back to his beach-adjacent apartment by his friend Rafe.

Cole had pawned some of his stuff with the murder victim, and is dumb enough to go straight away to the police to ask for them back, when Lt. Porter (Frank Silvera) tells him they would have given im the evidence when it was no longer evidence. Porter is a dogged investigator, and figures out pretty quickly that Cole killed the woman, but how to get Cole to confess?

Another subplot involves Cole's sister Debbie. She's recently gotten engaged to a much older lawyer, mostly so she can have a comfortable life, but this really ticks off Robert. And then Debbie's former employer Fred Swanson, now a widower, comes looking for Debbie because the man's late wife bequathed a nice sum to Debbie. However, Fred also propositioned Debbie which is why she left and is also something that ticks off Robert. Fred is another one who talks a lot to Robert about the subject of murder, something Robert can never seem to get away from....

I, having majored in Russian back in college, read the book Crime and Punishment ages ago and never really revisited it before seeing this movie version. The book is quite talky because of how it deals with philosophy and the idea of moral superiority. It's something that's difficult to translate to the screen, especially Hollywood of the 1950s. The idea to set it amongst a beatnik-adjacent community is a daring one, although one that doesn't always work. (Hitchcock, of course, got around the idea of philosophizing by having the gimmick of one location and extremely long takes.)

George Hamilton is not normally thought of as a "serious" actor, but to be honest, he doesn't do badly with the material. The supporting cast, however, is nothing special or memorable. Ultimately, Crime and Punishment, USA winds up as an intriguing experiment that doesn't quite succeed but is definitely worth a watch for what the moviemakers tried to do.

Catholic boy meets Catholic girl

Another of the movies that I have on my DVR which is getting another airing soon on TCM is A Majority of One. That next airing comes up tomorrow, December 3, at 10:00 AM.

In late 1950s brooklyn, Bertha Jacoby (Rosalind Russell) is a Jewish widow living in Brooklyn and displaying all of the stereotypes Hollywood had about Jewish mothers in those days. Her husband died some time back while her adult son was killed in action in the Pacific theater of World War II. She's got an adult daughter, Alice (Madlyn Rhue), who is married to Jerry Black (Ray Danton); he works for the US Foreign Service.

Jerry's job has the young couple moving from country to country as US foreign service officers do, and he's just about to get a new posting: to Japan, where he's going to be serving as a junior member of a committee negotiating a major trade deal with Japanese industrialists. Now that Jerry's mother-in-law is getting up in years, he and Alice suggest that she come along to the young couple with Japan. In the 2020s this would make no sense since Bertha can clearly support herself, but the past is, as they say, a foreign country.

The three fly to the west coast and then take a boat for the voyage across the Pacific. Among the fellow passengers on the boat is Koichi Asano (Alec Guinness). He's a Japanese businessman who meets Bertha and her family, and enjoys Bertha's company. Except that there's a catch, which is that Bertha still has a major issue with the Japanese, what with them being responsible in her mind for her son's death. Then again, Koichi lost his daughter when the Americans dropped that atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so the two are equal, in a way. A bigger problem, however, is for Jerry and Alice. Bertha doesn't work for the foreign service, so she may not be aware of how taking gifts from someone you'll be doing business with might be an issue. Bertha doesn't think anything of Koichi's kindess, but Jerry sees the possibility of Koichi trying to influence the negotations as Koichi is one of Japan's bigger industrialists.

So Bertha drops all contact with Koichi and arrives to Japan a very lonely woman since she doesn't know the language or the culture, and has no reason to be going out to diplomatic functions the way Alice would at least. And then things get far worse when the negotiations on that trade treaty go south and Koichi intimates that Jerry is responsible for the failure of this. Eventually, Bertha realizes that she has to try to put things right again in the name of international frienship.

Her gesture works in one way, but in another produces an even bigger personal problem. Koichi and Bertha like each other enough that Koichi is willing to suggest that the two "keep company" together, which is a euphemism for the first steps toward a marriage proposal. That seems utterly out of the blue, and Jerry and Alice are shocked, because this sort of cross-cultural relationship just isn't going to work, is it?

A lot will have been written in more recent reviews of A Majority of One of the utter horror of having a British man like Alec Guinness playing a Japanese man: yellowface, and all that. Perhaps the screenwriter (Leonard Spiegelglass, based on his stage play) could have written Koichi as the son of a Japanese diplomat who married a western while posted abroad; think Carroll Baker in Bridge to the Sun, which was based on a true story. Surprisingly, much less mention -- and certainly not offense -- is given to one of Hollywood's old arch-Catholics playing the Jewish mother.

In any case, the problems I had with A Majority of One weren't because of the casting, but more down to the writing. The issue that causes the whole diplomatic rift between Koichi and Jerry turns out to be something unrealistically petty. And Koichi and Bertha fall for each other much too quickly. Another problem is that the movie is much too long at 148 minutes; it probably should have been trimmed by a good 40 minutes or so as it's way too slow.

A Majority of One may be interesting as a period piece, but it's not a terribly great movie.

Not Zaftig

Many years ago -- it might even have been when I was in college -- I saw the Woody Allen movie Zelig. It finally showed up on TCM several months back, and recently I got around to watching it for a second time to be able to do the post here.

Zelig is a mockumentary, purporting to tell the tale of Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a man who was a sensation in the late 1920s but fell out of the public eye. Zelig came to fame because he was a literal human chameleon, being able to change to match the group of people around him. At a society party out on Long Island, he appeared like a rich Republican to the party guests; to the hired help, however, he could fit in as a working-class Democrat. He could even take on some of the physical traits of Asians.

Naturally, all of this interests a lot of people, from the general public who make him a minor celebrity, to famous people who, now elderly, talk about him to a modern-day documentary filmmaker (Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow are among the cameos). But it also intrigues scientists. Fortunately for them, Zelig's problems mean that he winds up getting admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which allows Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) to treat him, and film the treatments.

Along the way, Zelig falls in love with Dr. Fletcher, and the feeling is mutual. But outside pressure breaks up the relationship, causing Zelig to flee. People keep thinking they see Zelig somewhere, since his ability to fit in makes it a natural for people to think they see him. However, it's only when Dr. Fletcher and her colleagues watch a newsreal of the early days of Nazi Germany that they're convinced they really have found Zelig.

Zelig is interesting in that it was made in the early 1980s, so well into the phase of Woody Allen's career that started with about Annie Hall and marked a decided shift in tone in Allen's oeuvre. However, it often feels much more like Allen's early work. After all, Allen had already made one mockumentary in Take the Money and Run.

Zelig is also a technical achievement, in that Allen combines modern-day footage with vintage material, putting the Zelig character into the 1920s and 1930s at a time before computer editing made this a lot easier. As for the story, I don't think it works quite as well as I thought it did the first time I saw it. And for me, it certainly doesn't work as well as Take the Money and Run. But it's still a worthwhile watch and, unlike the films of some other auteurs, doesn't overstay its welcome. Zelig is definitely worth a watch if you get the chance to catch it.

Christmas month

It's hard to believe, but we're already into the final month of 2024. For certain branches of Christianity, notably Catholics, it's the first Sunday of Advent, which is I think in many ways the start of the ecclesiatical Christmas season. In US secular life, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was in some ways the start of the season, as the parade concluded with Santa Claus. Nowadays, the start of the Christmas season is getting pushed earlier and earlier, with radio stations starting their all-Christmas format as early as the end of Halloween.

TCM is, unsurprisingly, doing Christmas as always. They're having Christmas movies on weekend afternoons, starting this afternoon with Meet Me in St. Louis at 4:00 PM followed by The Bishop's Wife at 6:00 PM. Some of the movies are more in the "Jesus is the reason for the season" vein, as TCM is running the 1959 Ben-Hur followed by the 1961 King of Kings.

TCM then has its annual Christmas marathon, starting with the prime-time lineup on Friday, Dec. 20. Some of the films are going to be repeats from earlier in the month, and of course I've blogged about a lot of them before, but I'll make mention of some of those films as the marathon gets closer. Once again, TCM's Christmas marathon ends with... the daypart of the Dec. 25 schedule. Prime time is a night of ghost/spirit films, albeit not in the horror sense. That's something that's long bugged me, how many people want to end the Christmas season as soon as Dec. 25 comes around. I don't go all the way through to Twelfth Night/Epiphany the way the Catholic liturgy in particular does, but the rest of the month of December isn't a bad way to continue the Christmas celebration.

As for the rest of the month on TCM, I'll mention the Star of the Month when that comes up in a few days. Tonight sees the first of four nights in which Dave Karger will be sitting down with comedy legend Carol Burnett. She's presenting several movies that inspired parodies she did on her variety show that ran for a dozen years in the last half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Apparently, they'll also be showing some of those parodies along with the movies. This runs for four of the Sundays in the month as I mentioned above; Burnett will not be on the Dec. 22 schedule as that's part of the Christmas marathon.