The Devil Is a Sissy

Up next in the movies that I recorded during Mickey Rooney's turn as Star of the Month and had to watch in rapid succession before they expired from my DVR is another of his juvenile roles in The Devil Is a Sissy.

Rooney is only one of three juveniles here who are all relatively close to being the lead. Nominally, that lead goes to Freddie Bartholomew. He plays Claude Pierce, a boy whose parents have gotten divorced and whose mom (Katharine Alexander showing up briefly for the film's climax) got custody of the swanky New York apartment and a house in Florida, forcing architect father Jay (Ian Hunter) to live in a more working-class part of lower Manhattan, where he's going to have custody of Claude for the next six months.

Claude is put in a school where there are the sort of kids who are heading the wrong way but, since this is an MGM picture and there is the Production Code, you know are going to come out right in the end. Chief among them are "Buck" Murphy (Jackie Cooper), who lives with a surprisingly nasty father (Gene Lockhart) and who is more or less the head of the "gang" of schoolkids, although it's rather less violent of a gang than anything you'd get later on. His best friend and co-leader of the gang is "Gig" Stevens, who has it even rougher than Buck. Gig's father is sentenced to the electric chair, and Mom has a new suitor willing to take care of Gig (played by omnipresent character actor Grant Mitchell) but whom Gig doesn't like. Gig has an aunt Rose (Peggy Conklin) who was a showgirl, and whom Mr. Pierce apparently saw on stage, but who never really cared for Gig's father.

It's into this that Claude steps. Claude tries to fit in, not knowing that these kids are a bunch of petty troublemakers who are liable to get Claude into trouble as well. Gig wants to scrape up $80 -- a substantial sum in the mid-1930s -- for the headstone for Dad's grave, although he only finds out later this is a down payment for the stone he really wants to get. And to get that $80, he first tries to ask Aunt Rose, introducing his friends to her at her penthouse apartment. When that doesn't work, he thinks about stealing spare tires along with Buck, but that's liable to get them caught and is difficult anyway. Claude knows a place where they can steal much more valuable stuff to pawn for the $80....

Doing so, however, gets all three kids and their parents hauled before juvenile court where the judge gives them probation and makes them see a probation officer. Claude, being the goody two shoes, is bound to go along with this. Buck and Gig, however, have no intention of doing it; besides, they've got worse families they want to get away from. The plot gets even more nuts when, as part of running away, they get in a car driven by a bunch of real hoodlums much more ruthless than Gig's father ever way. Claude also goes out in the rain to keep Buck and Gig from trying to run away, and gets a life-threatening case of pneumonia for his trouble.

I didn't realize it until after watching The Devil Is a Sissy, but apparently there were two directors, with W.S. Van Dyke taking over from Rowland Brown. I'm guessing that it's this that results in the movie having a very uneven tone, careening from trying to be tough to being fairly melodramatic. This, and the plot twists and turns suddenly in ways that are even more unrealistic than most Hollywood movies. The three juvenile stars do as well as can be expected, and among the adults Gene Lockhart is quite good as the nasty father. But the material is what prevents The Devil Is a Sissy from being anything more than pedestrian.

The Champ is Back

Wallace Beery memorably won an Oscar for playing the father to Jackie Cooper in The Champ. Beery had a similar role, also opposite Cooper, in O'Shaughnessy's Boy.

Beery plays Michael O'Shaughnessy, nicknamed Windy. He's a big-cat tamer in a traveling circus, and he's got a bizarre idea for a trick in which a tiger will climb up on the back of an elephant and the two animals will go together through a ring of fire. But in the meantime, he's got a wife Cora (Leona Miracle) who is a trapeze artist with some emotional problems of their own. Together, the two have a son Joseph (played in the first half by Spanky McFarland), whom Windy has nicknamed Stubby.

Stubby loves his father, who at heart is trying to be a good person. But this being the circus, there's a lot of drinking and carousing going on, and this results in Windy returning to the family's trailer drunk on more than one occasion. Cora is growing tired of this, and has brought in her thoroughly nasty sister Martha (Sara Haden) to deal with it. Martha hates windy, and keeps putting ideas into Cora's head that she should take the kid and leave her husband.

Eventually Cora does, also clearing out the couple's joint bank account with the circus. Windy is despondent to the point that he loses his confidence, and when he tries to train one of the tigers to get on top of that elephant, he fails, with the tiger mauling him Siegfried and Roy style and costing Windy one of his arms. He leaves the circus and turns further to drink, trying to find his wife and kid.

Eventually, his old cirus comes back to town, and the boss, Dan Hastings (Willard Robertson) offers to help Windy find his son. It turns out that Cora kept up with the trapeze act but died in an accident during a performance. So Aunt Martha got custody of Joseph, and put the kid in a military academy. It's all Windy can do to get temporary custody of the kid for three months as a sort of trial to see whether he should get permanent custody of Joseph.

Joseph doesn't really remember his father, instead only knowing what Aunt Martha has told him about Dad. That, needless to say, is about as negative as you can imagine, so Joseph (now played by Cooper) hates his father too and doesn't really want to spend a summer with the circus. Windy tries evrything he can to earn his son's respect and love, but it doesn't seem to be working well.

With Windy also being back with the Hastings circus, Hastings wants Windy to do that tiger and elephant act, but Windy finds that every time he tries to get near the tiger, he loses his confidence, and the tiger knows it. Amazingly enough, however, Joseph has a beatific smile that seems to have a calming effect on the tiger and might enable Windy to do the act after all. But on the night they're supposed to go live with it, Aunt Martha shows up again....

O'Shaughnessy's Boy looks like little more than a programmer for Wallace Beery, pairing him with Cooper again because of the success of their previous movies together. The story is somewhat implausible but does mostly hold together, thanks in part to competent acting by both of the leads. Haden is also quite good as the really nasty aunt. Although O'Shaughnessy's Boy is nothing special, it's certainly worth checking out whenever the next time is that it shows up on TCM.

As one of the MGM movies that's part of the old Turner Library, O'Shaughnessy's Boy has also unsurprisingly received a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.