August 23rd
It's tempting to call Mickey Rooney a natural performer. More accurately, Mickey Rooney was born to it. Born Joseph Yule, Jr., the son of a burlesque hoofer and a comedian, he was on stage before he was two, a headliner at three, and starring in a series of hit short movie comedies before he was ten. He grew up in show business. He sang, danced, busked, told jokes, and soon became the family breadwinner. At an age where most kids were learning their ABCs he was learning pratfalls and double takes and how to land a punchline. He made his screen debut at the age of six and a year later landed the lead in Mickey's Circus (1927), the first of more than 80 comedy shorts he anchored as the tough, plucky Mickey McGuire.
The Mickey McGuire movies, low budget affairs cranked out so quickly that they rarely had time for second takes, was a crash course in moviemaking for the young actor and that mix of raw talent, road-tested skill, and ingrained professionalism set him up for success. All he needed was a role to showcase his potential.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) was that showcase. The great Austrian theater impresario Max Reinhardt first staged his lavish, fantastical take on the whimsical Shakespeare comedy as an all-star event at the Hollywood Bowl and the breakout star was Mickey Rooney as Puck, impish servant of the faerie king. Rooney was the first actor signed to the big screen adaptation, Reinhardt's feature film debut as a director, and at age 14 he stole the show from such veteran stars as James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Dick Powell. Rooney had never before performed Shakespeare but his years in burlesque made him a quick study, and if he didn't understand the language, he grasped both the concept of the character and the Bard's bold and bawdy comedy. From his memorable entrance, rising out of the earth of a magical forest like a force of nature, Rooney explodes on the screen. His Puck is pure id unleashed, a mix of adolescent satyr and wild child. He leaps like a goat, cackles his lines with flashing eyes, and brays his hearty laughter like a feral boy. The performance is hearty and passionate and earthy, embracing the larger than life dimension of his woodland faerie creature, and it was just the breakout role he needed to graduate from bit parts to featured roles.
MGM was quick to capitalize with solid supporting roles in major studio productions like Ah Wilderness! (1935) and Captains Courageous (1937), and even bigger parts in smaller pictures like Stablemates (1938), playing opposite Wallace Beery as an orphan stable boy who bonds with a washed-up veterinarian as they nurse an injured racehorse back to health. But it was the Andy Hardy films that elevated Rooney from supporting player to star. Mickey Rooney's spring-loaded incarnation of the over-extended, girl-crazy, car-crazy, hormonally-charged Andy became America's favorite high school boy, the all-American teenager before the word teenager was ever coined. In Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939), the seventh film in a series that ultimately gave us 16 movies, Andy falls for his new drama teacher. As in other entries, Rooney bounces through the film as a kid with boundless energy and no brakes, until he runs into complications and turns to his father for advice. The door to Judge Hardy's study is always open to Andy. But this story also showcases Rooney's talent for voices and characters and his range as performer. He goes big in the student play and then downshifts to small and sincere in his romantic yearnings and heartbreak.
For sheer range, the musicals he made with Judy Garland let Rooney do it all: sing, dance, do baggy pants comedy, and showcase his musicianship, all while anchoring a big cast with his commanding presence. Strike Up the Band (1940) was the second in a series of show business musicals directed by Busby Berkeley, what MGM called "backyard musicals" and what critics and historians branded "Hey kids, let's put on a show!" Like the Andy Hardy movies, they were produced on relatively small budgets (at least compared to the studio's more lavish grown-up musicals), with the spectacle provided by the stars. For this one, Rooney is a high school drummer who puts together his own swinging student dance band and Garland is his featured singer and would-be girlfriend, if he would only realize it. This is Rooney at his most energetic as he rallies the kids to raise money for a "battle of the bands" competition in the big city of Chicago by staging a hokey old melodrama.
Girl Crazy (1943) puts a couple of new twists on the familiar formula, with Rooney as a spoiled rich kid playboy in New York City sent to a dude ranch of a private school far from the city. Garland plays the mail carrier, the only young woman within miles, and of course they team up to put on a show, this one to raise money for the failing school. The role of cocky urban sophisticate in the west gave Rooney plenty of room for physical comedy while the film creates opportunities for Rooney to dance, sing, and at one point perform a rapid-fire one-man comedy act, ping-ponging back and forth between a variety of characters as he plays to a radio microphone. Rooney and Garland were longtime friends since they met in the MGM lot school and their chemistry is amazing both in intimate scenes and big song and dance numbers.
The focus on Rooney's talents as a multifaceted entertainer tends to gloss over his skills as a dramatic actor. Boys Town (1938) was the first film to really give Rooney a dramatic showcase. Spencer Tracy stars as Father Flanagan, the real-life priest who created a home for troubled boys as an alternative to reform school, while Rooney plays his greatest challenge, a street-smart kid who could be the juvenile delinquent version of a James Cagney gangster. Rooney had already played in dozens of films and even more shorts by this time but this role, a far cry from Andy Hardy's hyperactive, gee-whiz naiveté, gave the actor a character with range. He evolves from would-be street thug, all cocky arrogance and tough talk, to a boy torn between devotion to family and duty to the kids he's grown to respect. Rooney invests his emotional journey with an impassioned sincerity that stands out from the more cloying turns by his juvenile costars, and he helped turn the socially conscious drama into one of the top box-office hits of the year. Tracy won the Oscar for his performance and Rooney received a special Academy Award that year (along with Deanna Durbin) for "significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement." Tracy later praised Rooney as "the most talented man in the history of movies."
Boys Town paved the way for Rooney to move back and forth between his light, audience-pleasing Andy Hardy movies and Judy Garland musicals and more serious fare. He was a natural choice for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939), toning down his usual firecracker personality to play the fun-loving, superstitious kid who can’t give up his free-and-easy life of fishing and smoking, despite the best efforts of his kindly guardians. He becomes America's conscience as he banters with Jim (Rex Ingram), a man escaping enslavement, about slavery, fate and destiny. When it dawns on him that, slave or not, Jim is a human being, it ripples across his face like a remembered sin. He's earnest as Young Tom Edison (1940), playing the role that Spencer Tracy would continue in Edison the Man (1940), and grows from boy to man in The Human Comedy (1943), playing the adolescent son of a widowed mother, forced to grow up fast now that his brother is conscripted for World War II. The original screenplay by esteemed American novelist William Saroyan is steeped in sentiment. 1943 audiences may have imagined Rooney's Homer Macauley as Andy Hardy coming of age but Rooney's performance is far more subdued and introspective as he confronts death and loss both indirectly (delivering death notices to the parents of fallen soldiers) and directly. One of Rooney's gifts is his total commitment to a role, his body as expressive as his voice and his face, and his stillness adds a gravity to his growth from rambunctious kid to thoughtful young adult. It earned Rooney his second Oscar nomination. His director, Clarence Brown, insisted that "Mickey Rooney is the closest thing to a genius that I ever worked with."
National Velvet (1944) is remembered for launching another juvenile star, a young English girl by the name of Elizabeth Taylor, but Rooney not only gets star billing in this "girl and her horse" drama, he centers the film as the scruffy orphan who trains the spirited animal. Where Taylor essentially plays an innocent child sustained by optimism and faith, Rooney's orphan is wary and protective and haunted by a past mistake that has left him scarred by guilt. It's a powerful moment in an otherwise affirming family drama that Rooney grounds with the evolution of his character. It was Rooney's final feature before he was called to service in World War II. When he returned at the end of the war, it was also the end of Rooney as the all-American boy. Too old to play the kid but too short and baby-faced to get cast by Hollywood in traditional leading man roles, Rooney made efforts to remake his image into a tough guy actor.
Killer McCoy (1947), a boxing drama with film noir edge, was his second feature upon his return and it scuffs up his all-American boy image. His Tommy McCoy is a tough city kid who transitions from vaudeville song and dance man to lightweight boxer and gets tied up with a gambling boss. It's the first glimpse at the kind of character parts Rooney would get in the ensuing decades and it's another film that invites Rooney to show off his athleticism. He imbues the part with a sense of professionalism, a reflection of Rooney's own work ethic, and a bedrock of decency. It was made for MGM, his home studio for over a decade, as was The Strip (1951), which showcased the drumming skills he previously showed off in Strike Up the Band. It became his final film for MGM, the studio that made millions off his films.
Mickey Rooney was the number one box office star from 1939 to 1941 and while he never returned to the heights of success of his juvenile career, he never stopped performing. He continued playing both leading and supporting role in the movies, starred in two TV series and made appearances in dozens of other shows, played nightclubs, toured in plays, and even headlined on Broadway. He received an Oscar nomination for his supporting turn in The Black Stallion (1979), won an Emmy Award playing a mentally challenged man in the TV movie Bill (1981), and in 1983 won a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was also dogged throughout his life by hard living, crippling debts and financial mismanagement. He gambled away a fortune, was married eight times, and by the end of his life suffered elder abuse. He died in 2014 at the age of 93, a week after he finished shooting his part in his final feature, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2017). It was a sad end to the man Marlon Brando called "the best actor in films" and Laurence Olivier proclaimed "the greatest actor America ever produced."
