Word: rooney
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Britain, where women are a common sight, eleven male stars (Cinemactors Hope, Crosby, Tracy, Cagney, Gable, Bogart, Abbott & Costello, Rooney, Grant, Kaye) are as popular as any female. In Iceland, oddly enough, five males vie with Miss Grable...
...reasons for the colossal popularity of the Hardy Family pictures-which have grossed M.G.M. well above $20,000,000 against an investment of around $4,000,000-will probably not be found in the story of any one picture, certainly not in this one. This time Andy (Mickey Rooney) is on his way to Wainright College -a small-town boy, frantically determined to get started right. On the train he becomes flirtatiously embroiled with no less than three blondes, in plain view of his suave future dean (Herbert Marshall), who cruelly chooses to remain incognito...
What gives this film its callow charm? It is based on realism and on the comedy and basic good nature of U.S. character, however sugared and caricatured. Mickey Rooney's imitation of a boy's good & bad manners aboard a train is a bit of universal human comedy which Rooney's broad-axed clowning recklessly highlights. The Andy Hardy pictures are practically the only contemporary screen scratchings into the Comstock lode of U.S. genre comedy. Bad as they are, they are the nearest screen equivalent to Charles Dickens...
...unflexes, and the result is a good act. W. C. Fields, looking worn-&-torn but as noble as Stone Mountain, macerates a boozy song around his cigar butt and puts on his achingly funny pool exhibition with warped cues. Donald O'Connor continues to prove himself a Mickey Rooney with some unspoiled, big-Adam's-apple charm to boot. Orson Welles, as a nice parody of a magician, saws Marlene Dietrich in two and watches her better half walk off with the act. Sophie Tucker, the Manassa Mauler of her field, shouts a 1½-entendre salute...
...Rooney Wit. She even likes the Rooney ribbing and the Rooney wit. Well out of sight of the director, Mickey still mugs like a tic-ravaged chimpanzee in hopes that Cinemactress Garland will louse up the take with a laugh. An example of the Rooney wit occurred during the shooting of Babes in Arms. While Judy was catching a nap in her dressing room, Mickey planted a smoke-pot at the doorsill, bawled "FIRE!", and dashed a glass of water in her face as she sprinted out. Sometimes Miss Garland retaliates. When, making Girl Crazy, she appeared in white calfskins...