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.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

TCM's "Is it a dream" spotlight this month brings a movie from a star I don't get to mention very often, I think because his movies are generally not from studios part of the old TCM library: Danny Kaye. That movie is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which comes on tonight at 9:00 PM. (Yes, 9:00 PM ET might seem like an odd starting time for a TCM presentation since prime time begins invariably at 8:00 PM, but the first film at 8:00 is the 51-minute silent Sherlock Jr..)

Danny Kaye plays Walter Mitty, and you probably already know a bit about the character because the movie is loosely based on a short story by James Thurber; the Mitty name has entered the lexicon as a byword for a daydreamer; and there was another film version about a decade ago. Walter Mitty here is a daydreamer mostly to escape his crappy personal life. He lives in the New Jersey suburbs with his overbearing mother Eunice (Fay Bainter); commutes to New York to work as a proofreader at a publishing company that puts out pulp fiction, where his boss Mr. Pierce (Thurston Hall) steals his ideas; and has a fiancée Gertrude (Ann Rutherford) who you wonder whether she's part of an arranged marriage just to give Walter someone for a wife. Indeed, she's got another guy pursuing her. Dr. Hollingshead (Boris Karloff) comes along to give Walter a bad, unoriginal idea for another dime novel, and it's all too much.

So when Walter has to deal with the doctor, he finds himself imagining that he's a doctor, specifically a surgeon performing a celebrated new operation. Later, he sees himself as an RAF pilot fighting the Nazis in World War II, which also gives him the opportunity to sing a song when he's celebrating after another great aerial success. In all of these fantasies, there's a woman involved, a very pretty one indeed. It's also well known to everyone around Walter that he has a tendency to fantasize and is terribly absent-minded as a result, which is why nobody is going to believe him for the second half of the movie.

One day on the commuter train to work, whom should Walter see but the woman who's been in all those daydreams he's had! And, she approaches him! This time, it's a story that you'd think is so crazy even Walter can't believe it. The woman says her name is Roasalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), and that she's being followed by another passenger on the train. So would Walter be so kind as to pretend to be Rosalind's boyfriend? Walter, being a fantasist, goes along at least until he gets to his office. But he forgets his briefcase, and his need to go back and get it is going to bring him much further into the intrigue with which Rosalind is involved.

The actual nature of the intrigue, and what everybody is looking for, is of course a macguffin. Suffice it to say, however, that the bad guys know Walter has (or had) what they're looking for, and they're willing to kill him for it. Moreover, because of all of Walter's daydreams, nobody believes him when he says that there are well and truly bad men after him.

James Thurber didn't care for this movie version of his work, and I can understand why. There's not enough in a short story to turn it into a full-length movie, and the Goldwyn studio both had to do a lot of padding and tailor the material to Danny Kaye's talents, which are not going to be to everyone's tastes. I didn't dislike this version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but it's also certainly not a favorite movie of mine.

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

One of the prestige movies that I had not actually seen before is MGM's 1940 adaption of the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. So the last time that it showed up on TCM a few months back, I made a point of recording it so that I could finally get around to watching it and doing a full-length post on it.

The first thing to note is that the movie is based on a stage adaptation of the novel and that other changes were made to the novel in part to get it to run in a reasonable amount of time and in part because the Production Code would have had problems in a few places. I haven't read the original book, so I can't judge how much the changes affect what Jane Austen was trying to achieve with her work. But from what I've read, the main basic plot is still there.

Mr. Bennet (Edmund Gwenn) is the father in a family that doesn't quite have the means or the social standing to be truly members of the British upper classes of the Regency era. Not that the family is poor, mind you; it's more that their situation is best described as modest. Worse is that Bennet and his wife (Mary Boland) produced five daughters, and this is an era when property couldn't really be bequeathed to unmarried women like the daughters. So the parents are desperate to find suitably men to marry their daughters off to, starting with eldest daughter Elizabeth (Gree Garson). Otherwise, a cousin they don't like, Collins (Melville Cooper) will inherit the house.

Meanwhile, even without having read the novel I know that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Into the small town where the Bennets live comes Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor renting one of the manor houses in the area, along with his good friend Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier). Mrs. Bennett immediately gets the idea of introducing her daughters to these two in the hopes that one or both of them will decide to marry a Bennet daughter.

But there are a bunch of catches along the way. One is Mr. Collins, who wants to marry Elizabeth. There's also the fact that Darcy is not really of the same social stratum as the Bennets. And then there's Lady Catherine (Edna May Oliver), who has been helping out Darcy. She's set up an allowance for Darcy, and can remove it if he marries someone she disapproves of. There are further complications involving the other sisters, one of whom is being pursued by a man named Wickham who has a bit of a past that's all kept mysterious.

It's fairly obvious, however, that Darcy and Elizabeth are going to meet and fall in love, and eventually get married at the end of the story so that audiences can have their happy ending, which was particularly important with war clouds on the horizon.

Will fans of the original novel, especially if they've seen later adaptations that are more faithful to the source material, enjoy this 1940 version? I don't know. But I can say that for people who enjoy the sort of literary adaptation that Hollywood studios made in the pre-war era, they'll probably enjoy it quite a bit. MGM, as I've said, was probably the prestige studio in Hollywood, and their production values are the kind that work exceedingly well for a period piece like this even if it's not quite the same period as in the book. They've also got a lot of stars and character actors; Ann Rutherford and Maureen O'Sullivan play two of Elizabeth's sisters, for example.

So I'd say there's a lot worth recommending in this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.