Love Is a Headache

I'm going through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month. Next up is a movie made a year or so after the first Andy Hardy movie, but with Rooney still playing a juvenile role, and a supporting one at that: Love Is a Headache.

The male lead here is Franchot Tone, although first we see the female lead, Gladys George. She plays Carlotta Lee, a New York stage actress who, as the movie is opening, is seeing the play she's in closing. And it's not an uncommon occurrence, as the last four plays she's been in have all flopped. Tone plays Peter Lawrence, a gossip columnist who writes for a paper and has a radio show. He knows Carlotta from back in the day, and has always held a torch for her, to the point that he uses his columns to try to advance her career.

One of the problems is that Lee has had a knack for picking scripts that aren't right for her and aren't going to succeed on Broadway, so when Peter writes about them, his comments enrage Lee since she naturally figures he's being mean by writing horrible things about her. He's been known to do the same thing to other actors, without any real interest in advancing their careers. Why would it be any different for Carlotta.

And then the Mickey Rooney subplot takes over. Mickey plays Mike O'Toole, elder brother of Jake (Virginia Weidler). Their mother died a year or so ago, and they've since been raised by a single father who is a window washer. But Dad just died in a tragic accident, news of which reached Peter apparently before the next of kin could be notified. Peter knew Mr. O'Toole, and doesn't want the two kids to wind up in an orphanage where they'll be separated. So Peter uses his radio show to mention the plight of these two children, in the hopes that somebody will adopt them for real.

Carlotta's manager, Jimmy Slattery (Ted Healy in one of his final roles as the movie was released a few weeks after his untimely death), thinks this would be a great PR coup and get Carlotta's name in the papers in a good way which would make it more likely she could get better roles. SO the next morning the two kids are already in Lee's palatial apartment, which seems like it would violate all sorts of norms on the way trying to foster kids would work, but this is a 1930s Hollywood movie. Carlotta may not have a stable job, although she's got a wealthy man, Mr. Odell (Ralph Morgan), pursuing her.

Peter reads the news about Carlotta and the two kids and is pissed, as he wants a real family for the two kids and not a PR stunt. The kids realize, however, that they actually like Carlotta, and the feeling begins to become mutual. Remember, it wasn't her choice to do any of this as a PR stunt. But Peter decides that if Carlotta's agent is going to use the kids for a stunt, then Peter has to do anything he can to make certain Carlotta doesn't get the kids. It all leads up to the requisite happy ending that requires the audience overlook a lot of plot loopholes and threads that remain untied.

But then, Love Is a Headache runs a sprightly 73 minutes. It was never intended as anything more than a programmer, if not a straight-up B movie to keep people like Tone and Rooney in front of moviegoers. It's the sort of material that, 20 years later, would have formed the establishing story for some sort of TV sitcom. In that vein, the material works and is pleasant enough, but will probably not be considered memorable by anybody who watches. Certainly no more memorable than it would have been for audiences of the day.