“Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, June 28, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
It’s difficult for modern viewers to appreciate the immense popularity of MGM’s Andy Hardy films of the late 1930s and early ‘40s.
Take “Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever,” the seventh release in the 18-film series that began in 1937 and didn’t wrap up until 1958.
The movie finds Andy (Mickey Rooney) stewing over the dalliance of next-door-neighbor Polly (Ann Rutherford) with a dashing military officer. Feeling rejected, our high school hero is vulnerable to the charms of his substitute drama teacher, Miss Meredith (Helen Gilbert), for whom he falls hard. To impress her, Andy writes a play, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in the South Seas.
(Not to worry — it’s all very innocent. This was way before Mary Kay Letourneau.)
Meanwhile Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone), usually a paragon of Midwestern reserve, is giddy over the possibility of overnight riches when a couple of entrepreneurs (or are they scam artists?) reveal that acreage he owns is thick with aluminum ore.
Not terribly scintillating stuff — just some amusing/touching moments from a boy’s life. This is the sort of thing modern TV watchers have been able to get from any number of sitcoms. (“The Wonder Years.” “Malcolm in the Middle.”)
Which, in a way, is the whole point. The Andy Hardy movies served pre-television audiences in the same way that today’s network series do – by providing likeable characters with whom we identify and who we’re happy to follow over the course of many years/seasons.
Russian-born MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer saw the Hardys and their neighbors as representative of his adopted country at its best – generous, religious, patriotic, and tolerant. Turned out that Americans liked seeing themselves depicted in that way.
Butler's Cinema Scene 