My Mickey Rooney Film List

My wife is a member of a little group of teachers who call themselves “The Oldies but Goodies.” They used to be curriculum facilitators for Jordan School District and are now back as teachers in the classroom. They meet once a month to discuss curriculum. One of the group was able to obtain tickets to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert featuring Deborah Voigt last night, so the oldies went together. My wife was happy to go, because she has gone with me to the HD broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and has seen Voigt in four operas. The other oldies had never heard of her, the low brows!

I got to stay home and babysit the dog, because our family didn’t enter the “lottery” for concert tickets this year after not getting tickets for the last four years. What did I do? I watched a Mickey Rooney movie at TCM On Demand: Stablemates co-staring Wallace Beery, with Margaret Hamilton before she was the Wicked Witch of the West. Rooney was 17, playing a14/15-year-old. Most of his teens and early twenties he was playing younger teens and he could cry with the best of them.

 

Mickey Rooney was in 147 films from Manhattan Melodrama 1934, to Night at the Museum 2006. This does not include the almost two hundred television movies and series episodes he appeared in from 1952 to 2008. I have seen 38 of the movies he appeared in between 1934 and 2006, most of which were made between 1934 and 1944. Some of these I have seen multiple times. Rooney was the star of 96, unless I miss counted, Mickey McGuire comedies, cartoon voices, and short comedies between 1926 (age 5) to 1934 (age13). I have only seen two of the Mickey McGuire shorts (silent), and I don’t recall the titles. Here is a list of the Mickey Rooney films I have seen with the year, character name, and Rooney’s age during filming:

Manhattan Melodrama 1934   Blackie as a boy (13)

 

A Midsummer Night Dream 1935   Puck or Robin Goodfellow (14)

Ah, Wilderness 1935   Tommy (14)

Little Lord Fauntleroy 1936    Dick (15)

The Devil Is a Sissy 1936   “Gig” Stevens (15) One of my favorites.

A Family Affair 1937   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (16)

Captains Courageous 1937   Dan (16)

Hoosier Schoolboy 1937   Shockey Carter (16)

Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry 1937  Timmie Donovan (16) First film with Judy Garland.

Your only Young Once 1937   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (16)

Judge Hardy’s Children 1938   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (17)

Love Finds Andy Hardy 1938   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (17)

Boys Town 1938   Whitey Marsh (17)

Stablemates 1938   Michael “Mickey” (17) Second horse race movie.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1939   Huckleberry Finn (17/18)

Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever 1939   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (18)

Babes in Arms 1939   Mickey Moran (18)

Judge Hardy and Son 1939   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (18/19)

Young Tom Edison 1940   Thomas Alva “Tom” Edison (19)

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante 1940   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (19)

Strike Up the Band 1940   Jimmy Connors (19)

Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary 1941   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (20)

Men of Boys Town 1941   Whitey marsh (20)

Babes on Broadway 1941   Tommy Williams (20/21)

A Yank at Eton 1942   Timothy Dennis (21)

Andy Hardy’s Double Life 1942   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (21/22)

The Human Comedy 1943   Homer Macauley (22) Another favorite.

Girl Crazy 1943   Danny Churchill, Jr. (22)

Andy Hardy’s Blond Trouble 1944   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (23)

National Velvet 1944   Mi Taylor (23)

Love Laughs at Andy Hardy 1946   Andrew “Andy” Hardy (25)

Words and Music 1948   Lorenz Hart (27)

The Bridges at Toko-Ri 1954   Mike Forney (33)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s 1961    Mr. Yunioshi (40)

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 1963   Ding Bell (43)

Pete’s Dragon 1977   Lampie (56)

The Black Stallion 1979   Henry Dailey (58)

Night at the Museum 2006   Gus (85)

 

 

 

 

It Is Impossible to Clean As You Read

I have been cleaning my office/studio for the last month with little success. I thought that with school out for two weeks during the holidays I would accomplish so much. Alas, it is impossible to clean as you read. I have a collection of close to a hundred LIFE magazines from 1937 to 1947 that I am putting into ziplock polypropylene sleeves to protect them and hopefully extend their "life." If I had a full set there would be over 500 issues. There were at least a hundred issues that I had to throw out over the years, because they were destroyed by mildew and water damage. I acquired the magazines in 1960 from my eighth grade English/history teacher, Mr. Carmichael, at Johnson Intermediate School in Westminster, California. He hired a couple of us boys to come and help his wife and him do garden work, garage cleaning, and general work around their house. The LIFE magazines were stored in boxes in his garage. He was throwing them away, so he let me have them. My mother wasn't happy about it; more junk to clutter things up. To this day, I can hear her saying, "What do you want those dusty, old things for, anyway?" But I saw her looking through them at times when she thought I wasn't watching. I have saved them for fifty years.

Of course, as I pick up each one to slip into its new, zip locked sealed home, I have to thumb through it looking at the pictures and reading an article or two. They are "on the spot" history as it happened in the ten years before I arrived on the scene. When I finish handling them, my fingers are gray from the ink that sloughs off the thick black and white pages. Unfortunately, I am missing some issues that I know I had, and I know were not ruined with mildew. I have/had one of the 380,000 first issues of the magazine after Henry Luce bought the name from the original Life Magazine and launced it as a photojournalistic magazine. It hit news stands the week of 23 November 1936, and featured Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana on the cover. I must have stored the missing issues in another place for safe keeping. They are so safe I can't find them.



Henry Luce's first issue



LIFE was famous for its photography and short, pithy articles. There were a lot of graphic war photos of dead soldiers and civilians that probably would not be published in a magazine today, and a lot of "tasteful" nude photos as well, which seems strange for the 1930s and '40s. Perhaps they weren't as shocking in black and white. I puppose the graphic blood and guts and nude photos, whether tasteful or not, all in living color, are all now found in abundance on the internet.

As I read some of the articles in my collection, I find that many of the topics of seventy years ago are strangely current. The July 12, 1937, issue has a photo spread on striking WPA workers angry over cuts to the WPA budget. One striker's sign proclaims: "THE RICH CAN PAY FOR THE WPA." The title of the piece was "WPA Cuts Bring Strickes, Riots, Protest Parades: Relief jobs now seen as careers." The text says: "To support and give jobs to the unemployed (exclusive of CCC, subsistence homesteads, etc.) the U. S. Government has spent some $7,000,000,000 since the spring of 1933, $1,800,000,000 of it in the fiscal year which ended June 30. Over the protests of hardheaded Congressmen who felt that the time had come to stop such prodigious spending, President Roosevelt and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins secured for the new fiscal year an appropriation of $1,500,000,000. Even that much meant that Administrator Hopkins faced the hard task of lopping 315,000 persons off relief rolls, getting them down to 1,600,000 by July 15. The cuts fell hardest on artists and white-collar workers, chiefly in New York City where 11,800 WPAers were let out June 30. The result, which you see on these pages, was a fresh burst of angry parades, strikes, coercion and riots for bigger and better Relief."
Would it not be nice to have only a seven billion dollar problem instead of a fourteen trillion dollar problem?