Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and Mickey Rooney

I recently watched George B. Seitz's Life Begins for Andy Hardy on Turner Classic Movies and was impressed with how much darkness Seitz was able to insert in this film released just before America's entry into WW II:  a dancer friend of Andy's commits suicide when he can't find a job (though this was unconvincingly changed to a heart attack by the studio) and Andy goes hungry in N.Y., only finding a job because a femme fatale wants to make another man jealous.  There have been complaints about Judy Garland's four songs being cut from this film, but Seitz intelligently realize they were not appropriate to this story of hunger, unfulfilled lust, and suicide.  Of course MGM tried to make everything come out okay in the end by having Andy return home from the evil city to his family, but even then he crashes a car with his father in it (though no one is hurt and it is played for laughs).  At one point in the film Judge Hardy visits Andy in New York and gives him a cryptic lecture about "fidelity to the girl who will become your wife," though of course the word "virgin" was forbidden by the production code (and not used until Otto Preminger used the word in The Moon is Blue in 1953, which he released without a code seal).  Andy (and probably much of the audience) had no idea what he was talking about.

I realized when Mickey Rooney died last year that he actually had had quite a career.  Much fun has been made of his roles at MGM, especially Andy Hardy, but they were often complex characterizations of someone wanting to be a boy and also wanting to grow up.  Even when Rooney was discarded by MGM (from 1934-1944 he made more than five movies a year there) he always looked for good roles and sometimes even found them, my own favorites being Richard Quine's Drive a Crooked Road (1954), Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson (1957), Carl Reiner's The Comic (1969)  (he plays an older cross-eyed comedian who points to his eyes and says "when they stopped laughing at these they started killing each other"), the amusing, if maligned, role in Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and, my own favorite, the gangster in Preminger's Skiddo (1968).  In many of these and other roles one can feel the intense conflict between ego and id often apparent in the Andy Hardy films.