High School graduation

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a night of movies set in and around the end of one's time at high school. One of the movies happens to be on my DVR, so I watched it to be able to put up this post. That movie is Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, airing early tomorrow (May 5) morning at 4:00 AM, or still in the overnight hours depending upon your perspective and time zone.

Mickey Rooney returns as Andy Hardy, together with his father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), mother (Fay Holden) and English teacher Aunt Milly (Sara Haden), although his sister is absent from this installment of the series. As the movie opens, the Judge is ruling from the bench, called into his chambers because of a check with insufficient funds. As it turns out, that check was written by Andy, although Andy of course wasn't really trying to pass bad checks. Instead, Andy was trying to make up for insufficient funds elsewhere, but didn't have the money to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

The original check was for the senior class' funds at Carvel. Graduation is coming up, and to deal with the expenses, the senior class has imposed a head tax on the seniors, not taking into account that perhaps there were students in Carvel who aren't so middle class like the Hardys and all their circle of society. Two such people are the Land twins, Kathryn (Kathryn Grayson) and Harry (Todd Karns). Indeed, the Lands are sort of not part of anybody's social circle in Carvel. Judge Hardy decides he's going to investigate of course, along with making certain that Andy starts to involve the two Land kids in the rest of his group of friends.

The Lands are not well off and new to Carvel because of the war raging over in Europe (the movie was released in early 1941, before the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor). Dad Steven Land (Ian Hunter) is a very bright man who can speak nine languages, and used those talents to set up a travel agency that facilitated rich people's travel once they got to wherever in Europe he was based at the time. But of course, World War II began in Europe and nobody wanted to travel and there weren't so many places safe for the Lands, so they returned to the US more or less broke.

Judge Hardy has influence, so he talks to one of his friends at the State Department. Steven Land's linguistic skills include Portuguese, and with the Good Neighbor policy, the State Department can use a man like Steven as part of one of their trade delegations. The only problem is, the delegation is leaving this Thursday, which is the day before the high school graduation. Kathryn and Harry are for some reason expected to follow their father to South America, which means they'd have to leave Thursday as well. Can't something at least be done to have the kids follow later, or better yet, start a life as adults here in the US?

Andy thinks he's doing a good deed by editing the telegram to Washington saying that the Lands are perfectly ready to leave for South America on Saturday. But since there's an entire delegation, and they're all leaving in unison, that's taken as an admission that Steven won't be taking the job, which promptly gets filled before Judge Hardy finds out what happens.

Meanwhile, there are Andy Hardy's own problems. He's on all the committees surrounding the graduation, with the result that he's stretched himself too thin. He needs help, and since Kathryn has been taking business courses it's suggested by Judge Hardy that Andy hire Kathryn on as a sort of secretary. Andy's traditional girlfriend Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) finds out and is none too pleased. But in addition to needing an assistant, Andy is doing so many extracurriculars that he neglects his studies to the point that he fails his English exam. This means that he's in danger of not graduating with the rest of his class.

Of course, this being a Hardy Family movie, you know that all of the personal problems are going to be resolved with all of the good people -- and there really aren't any bad guys in a movie like this -- getting the positive outcome they deserve. It's the sort of feel good movie that audiences were going to like in an era where there was still that war raging on "over there" without America, even if there was the worry that America was going to get involved. But in addition to that, Andy Hardy's Private Secretary" was an opportunity for MGM to introduce its new star, Kathryn Grayson. She was more of a singer than an actress at this point, so MGM included a bunch of operatic musical numbers in the plot for Grayson to show off that operatic voice. What you think this does to the movie is probably going to depend on what you think of opera music in general.

With that in mind, I think I'd say that Andy Hardy's Private Secretary isn't particularly better or worse than the other movies in the series that I've seen; it's just got such different music that it'll influence your choice of which Hardy Family movie to watch.