Summer Holiday

TCM aired a bunch of movies suitable for Independence Day back on July 4. One of them was Ah, Wilderness!, which has a prominent scene set on Independence Day. Ah, Wilderness was turned into a musical by MGM a dozen years later. That musical, retitled Summer Holiday did not air on July 4, but does get a showing tomorrow, July 28, a 10:00 AM.

Mickey Rooney appeared in both movies, but obviously in different roles since he had become an adult in the intervening years. In Summer Holiday, he plays Richard Miller, a 17-year-old who is about to graduate from high school in a small town in Connecticut circa 1905. This is one of those towns that's a Hollywood nostalgia vision of what small-town life was like for middle-class families: Dad (Walter Huston) is the editor for the local paper; Mom (Selena Royle) is a housewife who surprisingly doesn't have a housekeeper; there's an older and younger brother; and also living with them are Uncle Sid (Frank Morgan) on Dad's side of the family and Mom's cousin Lily (Agnes Moorehead).

Richard has a high school sweetheart living right across the street in the form of equally middle-class Muriel (Gloria DeHaven), and Richard already knows he's going to marry her when he graduates from Yale in four years' time. However, there are some twists and turns along the way. One is that Richard has been reading works by revolutionary socialists, at a time when none of them had really taken over any European countries to show just how disastrous socialism in practice can be (never mind the trope about "real" socialism never having been tried). Richard plans to put some of this propaganda into his valedictory speech, but Dad fortunately finds out and comes up with a way to cut the speech off and make it look natural. That would be enough later for Muriel's father to want to put the kibosh on Muriel's relationship with Richard, but then there are the love letters he wrote her.

Meanwhile, among the family drama in the Miller home is Uncle Sid's drinking. It's prevented him from holding down a good job, and at one point he tries by going off to the big city only to get fired. If it weren't for that drinking, he'd be a natural pairing for spinster cousin Lily. Sid's drinking, however, is good for one thing in that it wins him a drinking competition at the town's Fourth of July celebrations.

But back to Richard; he having been dumped by Muriel's father and not realizing that it was he and not Muriel who forced the breakup, Richard decides to go out and experience "real" adulthood but hooking up with chorus girl Belle (Marilyn Maxwell) and going to a bar, even though he's underage. Richard acts as though he's got experience, but of course he doesn't, and so is unable to hold his liquor or his woman.

Summer Holiday is, however, a Freed Unit musical from MGM, so you have to expect that the ending is going to be one that leaves the audiences exiting the theater in a happy mood. How we get there is an exercise for the viewer.

I have to say that I really enjoyed Ah, Wilderness! (in which Rooney plays the kid brother, played here by Butch Jenkins) a lot more than Summer Holiday. I think a good portion of that is because the material doesn't really work so well as a musical. It also doesn't help that the songs aren't the highest quality. Maybe one song as background music during the Fourth of July sequence, but multiple mediocre songs (like the one about the Stanley Steamer) just brings the movie to a screeching halt. That's a shame in some ways because the source material should be so good. On the bright side, however, is that one can always go back and watch Ah, Wilderness! instead.