The Devil Is a Sissy

Up next in the movies that I recorded during Mickey Rooney's turn as Star of the Month and had to watch in rapid succession before they expired from my DVR is another of his juvenile roles in The Devil Is a Sissy.

Rooney is only one of three juveniles here who are all relatively close to being the lead. Nominally, that lead goes to Freddie Bartholomew. He plays Claude Pierce, a boy whose parents have gotten divorced and whose mom (Katharine Alexander showing up briefly for the film's climax) got custody of the swanky New York apartment and a house in Florida, forcing architect father Jay (Ian Hunter) to live in a more working-class part of lower Manhattan, where he's going to have custody of Claude for the next six months.

Claude is put in a school where there are the sort of kids who are heading the wrong way but, since this is an MGM picture and there is the Production Code, you know are going to come out right in the end. Chief among them are "Buck" Murphy (Jackie Cooper), who lives with a surprisingly nasty father (Gene Lockhart) and who is more or less the head of the "gang" of schoolkids, although it's rather less violent of a gang than anything you'd get later on. His best friend and co-leader of the gang is "Gig" Stevens, who has it even rougher than Buck. Gig's father is sentenced to the electric chair, and Mom has a new suitor willing to take care of Gig (played by omnipresent character actor Grant Mitchell) but whom Gig doesn't like. Gig has an aunt Rose (Peggy Conklin) who was a showgirl, and whom Mr. Pierce apparently saw on stage, but who never really cared for Gig's father.

It's into this that Claude steps. Claude tries to fit in, not knowing that these kids are a bunch of petty troublemakers who are liable to get Claude into trouble as well. Gig wants to scrape up $80 -- a substantial sum in the mid-1930s -- for the headstone for Dad's grave, although he only finds out later this is a down payment for the stone he really wants to get. And to get that $80, he first tries to ask Aunt Rose, introducing his friends to her at her penthouse apartment. When that doesn't work, he thinks about stealing spare tires along with Buck, but that's liable to get them caught and is difficult anyway. Claude knows a place where they can steal much more valuable stuff to pawn for the $80....

Doing so, however, gets all three kids and their parents hauled before juvenile court where the judge gives them probation and makes them see a probation officer. Claude, being the goody two shoes, is bound to go along with this. Buck and Gig, however, have no intention of doing it; besides, they've got worse families they want to get away from. The plot gets even more nuts when, as part of running away, they get in a car driven by a bunch of real hoodlums much more ruthless than Gig's father ever way. Claude also goes out in the rain to keep Buck and Gig from trying to run away, and gets a life-threatening case of pneumonia for his trouble.

I didn't realize it until after watching The Devil Is a Sissy, but apparently there were two directors, with W.S. Van Dyke taking over from Rowland Brown. I'm guessing that it's this that results in the movie having a very uneven tone, careening from trying to be tough to being fairly melodramatic. This, and the plot twists and turns suddenly in ways that are even more unrealistic than most Hollywood movies. The three juvenile stars do as well as can be expected, and among the adults Gene Lockhart is quite good as the nasty father. But the material is what prevents The Devil Is a Sissy from being anything more than pedestrian.