Two Pleasant Family Pictures

Radio Record, 10 June 1938, Page 26

Two Pleasant Family Pictures

Judge Hardy Again [Tv seems I’m just a sentimentalist at heart after all, hecause [ find something enor. mously refreshing about the nei series of pictures M.-G.-M, is making dealing with the exploits .of Jndge Hardy and his American family. The first of these, "A Family Affair,’ was released some time last year, but the second and third-‘You're Only Young Once" and "Judge Hardy’s Children"have just come to hand, with Lewis Stone now occupying the position of head of the family, formerly held by Lionel Barrymore. The change is for the better, I think. These pictures have a simple, homely quality: and, if they do nothing else, they should at least help to dispel the belief that the ordinary Ameriena

family is a weird social organism without parallel in any other part of the world. It isn’t, it appears, so vastly different from the family that lives next door. Rooney’s Role NEAT to their homeliness, the best thing about these stories is the performance of Mickey Rooney as the son of the family. His portrayal of precocious adolescence is, to my mind, too amusing and too real to be annoying (though I know there are people who disagree with that view). Mickey’s perpetual state of calf-love may be shocking to some, but it is not, L suggest, very far from life. Cecilia Parker makes the daughter seem a thoroughly nice and natural girl, and there is the same simple honesty about Fay Holden as the mother. Same Plots PHE plots are all more or less variations on the same" theme. Daughter, engaged to be married, hecomes innocently involved with some other, less worthy, fellow; young son loses his heart to some schoolgirl, who keeps him busy for the rest of the picture; father has to straighten out all these domestic tangles, and at the same time prevent the family from losing the PUDEPEAUDUATECEEDEERSCUGTEUEGTERDSCUEEESEEE EEE TEES —

old homestead. Either he has mortgaged it to help a friend or else he has become involved with crooked politics. In "Youwre Only Young Once" the family goes on vacation to Santa Catalinn Island ("That’s so far away, Vd just as soon go to New Zealand," protests mother). In "Judge Hardy’s Children" they encounter the pitfalls of high life in Washington. Lewis Stone is exceedingly good as the omniscient judge who always manages to pull a winning card out of his

sleeve just as the family faces bleak (lisaster. But one could wish that Judge Hardy wasn’t quite so infallible. I’d like to see him kick over the traces himself a bit in his next picture. [‘"You’re Only Young Once" and "Judge Hardy’s Children." M.-G.-M. Directed by George B. Seitz. Starring Lewis Stone, Mickey Rooney. First release: "You’re Only Young Onee." Wellington, June 24.]