Dad for a Day

Mr. Henry owns the service station next to Mrs. Baker's lunch counter. He is too shy to proclaim his love for her. Fathers and sons day picnic is coming up. Mickey Baker (Robert Blake) doesn't have a father. Our Gang searches for a substitute and recruits Mr. Henry to take Mickey. They and the kids have a great day.

This is an Our Gang short. They have little Robert Blake doing a lot of child star acting. He is fake crying. He is doing big kiddie acting. He is worthy to be a modern child star who one day would come to a tragic scandalous end. It is almost inevitable. It all starts right here.

Granted, most people wouldn't want their careers judged on the basis of anything they did when they were six years old, but this is exactly the the problem with Dad for a Day. Plotted around planning a father and son picnic, the gang has forgotten a little detail about Mickey (Robert Blake) Baker: he hasn't got a father. The gang works their magic to fix up Mickey's mom with Bill Henry (Jean Louis Heydt), the local gas station owner. He's the shy type but already has his heart set on marrying Mrs. Baker--- the picnic being just the thing to work up the nerve to pop the question. MGM Our Gang entries really can't be graded along the same scale as anything produced by Hal Roach. Dad For A Day ranks as a superior MGM short but it still falls far short of most of the earlier Roach-produced entries, why? Mickey Gubitosi (Robert Blake) shows not one whit of acting talent--- watching him as a child makes one wonder if he wasn't abducted as a teenager by aliens from the Planet Strassberg. He became a decent actor in the 1960's, but you'd never guess it from seeing him acting as a 6-year old. 4 out of 10.

After only three films, Mickey is suddenly put in the position where he has to emote. For a long time.

The gang is staging a father-and-son picnic, but Mickey has no father. In fact, Mickey tells us this quite eloquently: "yaaa yaaa yaaaaa no yaaaaa! Yaa no yaaaa!" Fortunately, for the next few minutes, Mickey's off screen, and the gang goes and searches for a father. They find one in a gas station attendant who just happens to have a crush on Mickey's mother. And... then it just gets sentimental, dull and predictable.

I will give this one marks for the cast: Tom Herbert as a "hoo-hooing" gas station patron (he was the brother of noted hoo-hooer Hugh Herbert), Milton Parsons as an expectant father (notable for selling Lucy baldness cures on "I Love Lucy") and Arthur Q. Bryan, also the voice of Elmer Fudd. Also, there's a sincerity to Louis Heydt's performance as Mickey's new dad that's admirable. If it weren't for Mickey... it might just have been a bland bit of MGM hometown geewhizziness.

Dad for a Day (1939)

*** (out of 4)

The gang is about to have their father-son picnic but they then remember that Mickey (Robert Blake) doesn't have a father. They ask a gas station worker to be Mickey's father for a day and good things come from it. DAD FOR A DAY is pretty sappy, that I will admit, but at the same time it's incredibly cute and very much worth watching. The film plays for more drama than anything else, although there are a couple funny moments to be found. The highlight is certainly the scenes at the picnic when we see young Mickey finally smiling after getting to spend the day with someone he could look up to as a father. These scenes are pretty touching thanks in large part to an earlier scene where Mickey cries about not having someone there with him. I personally thought Blake did a very good job during both sequences and his performance certainly helped the picture. I also thought Louis Jean Heydt was extremely good as the would-be father. Fans of the series should enjoy this one as long as they don't go into it expecting some sort of wild comedy.

This M-G-M comedy short, Dad for a Day, is the one hundred eighty-fifth entry in the "Our Gang" series and the ninety-seventh talkie. Mickey's mom runs the coffee shop and a Mr. Henry is the gas station attendant next door. When Mr. Henry is at the coffee shop, he keeps ordering the coffee though he really likes Mickey's mom, who seems to think the same thing about him but neither says anything. At the gang meeting, Spanky reminds the members about the Father-Son picnic on Sunday which gets Mickey crying and abruptly leaving as Spank and Alfalfa asks what's wrong with him, forgetting he's fatherless. I'll stop there and just say that I thought both Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann-the authors of the definitive Our Gang filmography book-may have been a little harsh in criticizing Robert Blake's performance when crying as he didn't seem as insipid as I had feared when watching this again after nearly 40 years. The rest of the stuff after that was fine with both Louis Jean Heydt and Peggy Shannon aces as Mr. Henry and Mickey's mom. They'd both return in the series in All About Hash. So on that note, I recommend Dad for a Day. P.S. Since I always like to cite whenever a player from my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life, appears elsewhere, I feel I should note the nice appearance of Mary Treen as a receptionist here-similar to her role in IAWL complete with wisecracks. And if Spanky's father here sounds familiar, well, it's because he's played by Arthur Q. Bryan, Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons!