Continuing to go through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month in December 2024, this time it's another of the musicals he did with Judy Garland, Babes on Broadway. This is, of course, not to be confused with Babes in Arms which is another musical that Rooney and Garland did together although they play different characters.
This time around, Mickey Rooney is playing a young man named Tommy Williams, who is apparently all grown up since he doesn't have any parents around. That, and he's part of a trio calling themsleves the "Three Balls of Fire" together with Ray (Ray McDonald) and Hammy (future director Richard Quine when he was still in front of the camera). They have dreams of fame, but of course those dreams don't seem to be going anywhere in part because it's tough to make it in New York, and more generally tough to get noticed period. On their last night performing as the entertainment at an Italian restaurant, they get a big tip from a Miss Jones (Fay Bainter). It turns out that Jones is actually the executive assistant Thurston Reed (James Gleason), and she is able to get the Three Balls of Fire an audition with Reed.
Of course, Tommy is a bit stupid in that he tries to use this to get all his other friends auditions too, which is not what Reed would want. And the friends is a new one, Penny Morris (Judy Garland). She is the daughter of a music teacher, and works at a settlement house with underprivileged children. The settlement house is looking to do the fresh air thing; that is, get city kids out of the city for a couple of weeks and up to a camp in the Catskills or out in New Jersey or some such). Tommy and Penny both get the brilliant idea to set up a charity fundraiser of having the young people perform, except that Tommy intends to use it to raise the money to rent a real theater instead of helping the poor city kids.
That threatens to put the kibosh on what is also going to be a budding relationship between him and Penny, as you might guess since these musicals are nothing if not formulaic. But a wrinkle gets put in those plans thanks to World War II on the other side of the Atlantic. (The movie was released a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, although surely most of the filming must have been before December 7, making it interesting that this plot line is in the movie.) As a result of the war, British children were being evacuated to Canada and the US (as in On the Sunny Side which shows up from time to time on FXM), and they need help more than the settlement house kids. Also, Tommy has more sympathy for them and probably wants to bed Penny too, so he decides to be honest.
This gives Jones the idea of letting the kids use one of Reed's old, disused theaters if they can refurbish it (where are they going to get the money for that) to put on the show. The refurbishment offers the opportunity for probably the best sequence in the movie, as Penny and Tommy imagine the performers who played here in previous generations and do their impressions of what such performances might have been like. However, there are legal issues with the show going forward, combined with the fact that Reed doesn't exactly know his old theater is being reused. But, since it's a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musical, we know that it's going to have a happy ending.
That happy ending is where the minstrel show comes in, and is the thing that pretty much everybody else brings up in discussing Babes on Broadway, because this is a long blackface sequence, much longer than there were in some other movies. And modern-day people have to point out how terrible it is that this stuff was popular back in the day. (Some might say still is, except that it's now womanface and men who don't look like convincing women calling themselves "trans" so they can get off on getting into what are supposed to be private spaces for women.)
In any case, Garland and Rooney give their typical rousing performances, and it's easy to see how the movie taken as a whole would have lifted the spirits of audiences on the homefront who had a lot going on in their lives by the time the movie was released. So Babes on Broadway is actually worth a watch.
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