Word: rooney
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Drive a Crooked Road (Columbia). The awkward age for most boys was the golden age for Mickey Rooney. But like most prodigies, one of the most talented child actors of modern times has had to pay for his precocity. At 24, he found himself a has-been-the public would no longer believe that he was a boy and was bored by the suggestion that he was a man. In the last five years, Mickey has made seven pictures, in each of which he seemed less and less the Hardy perennial...
...Wild One has the disturbing shock of reality (it is based on The Cyclists' Raid by Frank Rooney, about a gang of motorcycle hoodlums operating in California in 1949), but its main purpose seems to be to shock. No one can doubt that the movies are highly skillful at picturing brutality and violence, but The Wild One suggests that Hollywood may be making too much of a bad thing...
...dressing room. On his first assignment, Emcee Mike Wallace, smoothly exuding an out-of-towner's wonderment at the workings of the theater, used his tape recorder to get French Singer Lilo's story of her sudden stardom in Can-Can, veteran Hoofer Pat (Guys and Dolls) Rooney's advice to youngsters (first rule: "Don't whistle in the dressing room"), Shirley Booth and Basil Rathbone in a wake for the late Empire Theater, and Rosalind Russell with songs from Wonderful Town. This week's guest list: Rodgers & Hammerstein, Elliott Nugent, Yul Brynner, Ezio Pinza...
...previous major attempts: Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) with Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown and James Cagney; MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936) with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer. Financially and artistically disastrous, these productions convinced Hollywood that Shakespeare was "boxoffice poison...
...John Rooney was not licked. He bided his time while the powerful veterans' organization lobbyists, who feared that the firing power would upset the veterans' preference features of the civil-service law, went to work. Seventy-two minutes after the first vote, Rooney maneuvered another vote, this time by roll call. Result: the House reversed itself, took the firing power out of the bill, 181-168, and sent it along to the Senate, where Republican leaders will try to get the power back...