ANDY HARDY'S DOUBLE LIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 219, 3 September 1943, Page 21

ANDY HARDY'S DOUBLE LIFE

| (M-G-M)

PRECEDING this feature was a short item about the work being done by the Museum of Modern Art in America to pre-

serve films of historic interest for the benefit of coming generations. Apparently celluloid perishes within 20 years even under the best conditions, so that every film on the Museum’s shelves must be periodically re-copied. Thanks to this painstaking work, students of the future, said the commentator, will know far more about us from films than we have ever been able to learn about our ancestors from books. Very true; but when we came to the feature ‘on the programme (which presumably will one day find a place on the Museum’s shelves), I couldn’t help wondering what sort of an idea of 20th century behaviour social historians of 3000 A.D. will get when they sit down to a re-screening of Andy Hardy’s Double Life-or for that matter of any others of the Hardy series. They may be impressed, for instance, that a man as aged as Judge Hardy should have a son as youthful as Andy; they: may be struck by the fact that the girls with whom Andy canoodles (or should I say "necks"? ) are so. obviously more mature than he is; they may wonder that a Judge of an "American Court should decide a case in private on his back porch and that, while a law suit is still sub judice, he should consider it quite in order to receive personal representations from interested parties. They will almost certainly gain the impression (not incorrectly) that the Americans of 1943 were a highly sentimental race. And yet they might do a lot worse than study the Hardy Family. For these movies come a good deal closer to being true social documents than the average film. Therein, I believe, lies the secret of their enormous popularity: for all their faults they d6 present a fairly accurate picture of the life of average, ordinary people-and particularly of the average citizen of the U.S.A., or so I am assured by Americans I have questioned. Eyen the points that I have picked on above may be merely peculiarities of the American scene that are likely to strike a non-American observer: there is still enough of the common stuff of life in these films to make them acceptable to audiences in this country, in Great Britain, and elsewhere. Films like this are, of course, the modern equivalents of the old-fashioned serial, in which you get continuity of character and setting instead of continuity of narrative. Lewis Stone may be friskier in the latest episode than in the previous one, or he may be more weighed down with problems; Mickey Rooney just setting off for college, may be even more. precociously amorous than he was when leaving grade-school; but basically they all remain the same people, just as you can also be sure that they will all sit down to supper in the same order as they have done for six years and 13 pictures, and that the telephone will be found in the same place at the foot of the stairs. It is said, and one can well believe it, that M-G-M maintains special employees whose job it is to note down all the

characteristics of the Hardy menage, the position of every piece of furniture in the house, and so prevent any unexplain- | able deviations from picture to picture. Nothing must happen to the Hardys that would be unlikely to happen to an average middle-class American family. Film-' goers, who like to be sure of something in a precarious world, have repaid this diligence by turning the Hardy pictures into some of the biggest profit-makers in screen history. How long the series can continue I wouldn’t venture to predict: there are signs in the current episode that the old Judge is beginning to dither and that young Andy and his girlfriends will soon need the protection of wedding-rings.