Word: rooney
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Babes on Broadway (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Even in Hollywood, the custom among the males is to grow up first, and then get married. Against-the-grain Mickey Rooney, 21, got married last week to 19-year-old Hollywood Newcomer Ava Gardner. That adulthood is something he has yet to attain as an actor, Babes on Broadway makes uncomfortably plain. Miss Gardner, fresh from easygoing North Carolina, may have a maturing, decelerating effect on her breathless mate; in that case the future may be worth hanging around...
Babes consumes so much celluloid at such a loud pace that it is one of the most exhausting pictures of this or any other year. Besides the strenuous theatrical Rooney calisthenics, Babes also has waspy Alexander Woollcott cooing about young folks and the theater; brigades of vigorous young Americans doing dance numbers and rushing about; English refugee children conversing with their parents by short wave. It also has a plot...
...most disappointing part about this film is that it looked as if it might mildly promising in a Sunday afternoon sort of a way. Mickey Rooney has his admires. He has, in the past, fulfilled a certain valuable function in glorifying the American family as Andy Hardy. My mother wouldn't throw his autograph into the waste basket, if he sent it to her. And Judy Garland has a very nice voice. We are merely trying to prove that it wasn't entirely our fault for going to the movie in the first place...
Once we were there, the plot turned out to be one of those arbitrary scenic ramblings that spends most of its time trying to weave its way into a musical. It had to let Andy Rooney be boys-must-be-boyish and let Judy Garland sing. So Rooney, having failed to crash the New York theatrical world, and having met Judy in the process, decides to combine all the unheeded young talent in the city, get a city block from somewhere, give a tremendous musical, and gain fame, fortune, and Judy at the same time. We really couldn...
...real criticism is that everything in the picture is an excuse for something else that doesn't quite happen. The director spends half an hour of action and dialogue working up to a point where he can get Judy Garland seated at a piano and Mickey Rooney saying. "Oh, even if you can't, let me hear you just for the fun of it," and then she is forced to warble a flock of notes that the Hollywood songwriters bunched together between floor shows at the Brown Derby. Virginia Wilder doesn't help. Well, there is no use in going...