Judge Hardy and Son

There were 16 movies made in the MGM Hardy family series, if you count the one from the late 1950s after Lewis Stone died. Surprisingly, I haven't done posts on all that many of them. But one of them aired on Father's Day and is getting another showing tomorrow since the plot nominally deals with July 4. That movie is Judge Hardy and Son, on TCM on July 4 at 6:30 AM.

Lewis Stone is once again Judge Hardy, who shows up at court only to find that there are no cases on the docket. That tranquility is interrupted by an immigrant couple, the Volduzzis (Maria Ousepnskaya and Egon Brecher), who have been served with a writ that they're going to have to leave their house for being unable to pay the mortgage, which seems like a surprise since Mr. Volduzzi has only been out of work for three weeks and you'd think he's old enough to receive Social Security which had been in place four four years by the time the movie was released. If they have any surviving children, perhaps she could be imposed on to do something to help them. But Mrs. Volduzzi claims their daughter is dead. Judge Hardy suspects this is a lie.

Andy is at home getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations, except that all of the innertubes in his car's tires keep bursting, leading to a bunch of financial issues yet again. He's already borrowed money from Beezy, and now he's going to borrow some from big sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) before she heads off to a cabin with friends for the holiday. Mom (Fay Holden), meanwhile, and Aunt Millie (Sara Haden) are planning to head off to their parents' house for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Andy needs to do something to get more money before Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) returns for Independence Day. One way he hopes to do so is to help his father find that Volduzzi daughter, which involved interviewing everyone in town who has the middle initial V because a grandkid would have the middle name Volduzzi. (It wasn't uncommon in those days for people to get their mother's maiden name as a middle name.) The other idea is to win the public oratory contest by writing a speech on Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, he misreads the contest rules and discovers that the $50 first prize is for the best speech by a girl. A boy gets a 20-volume set of biographies of great Americans. So Andy both sees a bunch of girls his age with the middle initial V, while trying to get them to read a speech he'll write in exchange for splitting the prize money. They, not being stupid, try to blackmail Andy by making him take them to the big July 4 shinding. When Polly returns and find this out, she's going to be none too happy.

And then things take a surprisingly dark turn for a Hardy Family movie. Mom gets off the train and returns home claiming to feel unwell. The doctor diagnoses her with pleurisy, which would certainly cause her a fair deal of pain. But the the pleurisy progresses into pneumonia, which is a much more serious illness with the rest of the family worried she might die. But then, this being a Hardy Family movie, you have to expect a happy ending.

There's surprisingly a lot going on here for a 90-minute movie. Also surprisingly, it mostly meshes well. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Judge Hardy and Son, but watching a movie like this you can see why the series was so popular back in the day. With the lingering effects of the Depression and the war going on in Europe, something like this was just what was needed to take audiences' minds off of their daily problems. Definitely worth a watch for MGM's rose-colored view of 1939.