Being nearly the same age, I Identified with the characters Mickey Rooney played through his long career (1926-2014). When I was in my teens, Rooney was the highest paid star in Hollywood, all because of 16 Andy Hardy movies he made. I saw them all.
 |
| Judy Garland was in three of them, but never played "Polly Benedict", Andy's one true love. |
 |
| Here's Judge Hardy and his family Lionel Barrymore was Judge Hardy in the first film, but Lewis Stone played the all-wise father in all the rest. |
 |
| "Love Comes to Andy Hardy" had Judy and other equally young starlets. |
 |
| "The Human Comedy" You won't hear or read much about this one but it's one of my favorites. Mickey plays a young man working in the telegraph office during WWII, and is burdened with trying to keep the telegrapher (Ralph Morgan) sober enough to do his job as well as delivering telegrams that usually started "We regret to inform you that your son..." An extremely moving WWII movie. |
 |
| The bad boy that changes his ways under the influence of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy), proving that "There's no such thing as a bad boy." |
 |
| You won't read or hear anything about Mickey's role in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" His buck-toothed portrayal of a Japanese man offended just about everybody. (It really was grossly overplayed.) |
 |
| Before he was Andy Hardy he was the perfect Huck Finn. |
 |
| His career went downhill after he lost his youthful exuberance but he came back with flying colors in such movies as "Requieum for a Heavyweight", with Jackie Gleason and Anthony Quinn |
 |
| He held his own with these comics and many more in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" |
 |
| But this is the Mickey Rooney I will always remember when he and I were both teen-agers in the 1940s. It's been sort of like a death in the family. |
