Skippy

Paramount Pictures was one step from receivership until Mae West and Bing Crosby signed with them during the Depression. But this film I'm sure kept the wolf from the door for a little while. Skippy which is based on a popular comic strip of the day was the career role for little Jackie Cooper while he was a child star.

Cooper was one of the few child stars to have a real career in front of and behind the camera and it was a long one. He also played a wide range of characters. Yet when his name is mentioned today the first thing that comes to mind is the little kid with the knickers and somewhat pouty, but with a good heart and a set of values that he did not get from home completely.

Skippy is the child of town doctor Willard Robertson and Helen Bennett and he's a good kid at heart. But Robertson who's a fundamentally decent man doesn't want him playing with the kids on the other side of the railroad tracks. That's shantytown and there were plenty of them in America in 1931. Skippy is a film of its time although I'll bet that people who lived in those shantytowns did not part with the nickel needed to see Skippy, it was needed for important things like food.

Robertson as director of the board of health also wants to clean the place up. But with scant regard for the people who live there. So when Skippy makes friends with a slum kid who lives there played by Jackie Coogan's brother Robert and his mother Helen Jerome Eddy and their dog it turns out to be a turning point in everyone's lives.

With his decent, but thickheaded father and a mother oblivious to all except what's within the four walls of their home, Skippy grows up with an intuitive sense set of good values. It's what makes Jackie Cooper's character such an appealing one to this day.

Skippy brought home a Best Director Oscar for Norman Taurog and a few other nominations. Taurog gets it for some superb direction for a flock of kid players who are the ones carrying the film. It musn't have been easy, but the results are great.

Skippy is a film firmly within the Depression times it was made, but it has a universal family appeal to this day.

... and even though it was a Best Picture nominee, I figured a film about a comic strip character involving child stars would probably not be up my alley. But it was quite good.

Skippy (Jackie Cooper) is the only child of Dr. And Mrs. Skinner. Dr. Skinner is the head of the city board of health and has condemned the poor side of town - "shanty town" - to be destroyed because he considers it a breeding ground for disease and ordered all of the inhabitants to move. I guess he just can't figure why they haven't, without prompting, put a few cases of Perrier water in the back of the family Suburban and signed a lease for a more sanitary upscale condo, to put it in very modern and similarly elitist terms. So dad is overconcerned with work and a bit clueless.

Over in shanty town, which is a place Skippy's parents don't want him to play, Skippy has made friends with Sooky. Sooky has a problem because the dogcatcher, Nubbins, has caught Sooky's dog and it will take three dollars - a princely sum in 1931 for a child - to get the dog the needed license and rescue him from being killed, which is scheduled to happen in three days if the boys don't return with enough money for a dog license.

Perhaps I had a bad attitude going into this because of all of the saccharine movies involving child stars made over at MGM during the same time period, movies that are very available thanks to Ted Turner's largesse during the 1980s. Maybe it was because, besides Jackie Cooper, the only other child star's name that I recognized was that of Mitzi Green, the lone child star of the period contracted to Paramount and extremely annoying in every role I had seen her in. Fortunately, though, she is in small doses here and doing what she did best - being annoying.

At any rate, this really is good entertainment for child and adult alike that doesn't drag at any point. Some of the adults actually learn something and it also illustrates that poor people can really be complete jerks for no good reason just as easily as rich people can.

SKIPPY (Paramount, 1931), directed by Norman Taurog, which has nothing to do with a development of the peanut butter product, is a cute story based on the then popular comic strip character as portrayed by Jackie Cooper in a performance that earned this 10-year-old child actor an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor. Losing to one more than twice his age, Lionel Barrymore, for A FREE SOUL (MGM, 1931), SKIPPY did earn other nominations: Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Norman Taurog and Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and Best Director (Taurog, who won the honor that year).

The story opens in a small wholesome town where the camera sets focus on the Skinner household. There's Herbert Skinner (Willard Robertson), a town physician, his wife, Ellen (Enid Bennett), and their little boy they call "Skippy" (Jackie Cooper). Getting ready for breakfast. Mr. Skinner calls for his son to get out of bed and dressed. As he is calling, the camera then pans upstairs into Skippy's bedroom where the boy is still in bed, pretending to be putting on his clothes lazily asking his parents downstairs which shirt to put on. After heading down for breakfast, Skippy is visited by the neighborhood kids, Sidney (Jackie Searle), an obnoxious tattle-taler, and his sister, Eloise (Mitzi Greene) who takes the time to recite a poem, "In Memory of a Dead Dog." Later, Skippy, who spends his free time in a "swell" district known as Shantytown, located on the opposite side of the tracks where poor people live, meets and befriends another boy called Sooky (Robert Coogan). At first Skippy wants to fight him, but when Sooky stands his ground, they become instant friends. Their day consists of innocent fun that lands them into trouble when they accidentally break the windshield of the mean Mr. Nubbins (Jack Clifford) car, whose profession is dog catcher. Later, Mr. Nubbins takes away Sooky's dog, Penny, for not having a license, placing the animal in the pound. Sooky is able to retrieve the dog, only if he comes up with a $3 fine for the license. With Skippy's help, they do, but Nubbins takes the money to replace his broken windshield, forcing the boys to come up with an additional $3 by 3 p.m. in order to get Penny, or else she'll have to "be destroyed." The boys attempt to get that extra cash first by getting some money from Skippy's piggy bank, collecting empty bottles, doing errands, selling lemonade and putting on a show for the neighborhood kids. While the boys successfully raise the money, the unexpected occurs. Skippy soon finds himself resenting his father, who not only warned him to stay away from Shantytown, but has looked down towards those the people whom Skippy finds to be just plain ordinary folks as he and his parents are, with the exception of having more money than they do. As with most family movies, and later TV sit-coms, there's a moral lesson here to be learned. In this instance, rather than the children, it's learned by the parents, particularly Skippy's.

Featured in the supporting cast are Guy Oliver as "Dad" Burkey; Donald Haines as Harley Nubbins and Helen Jerome-Eddy as Sooky's widowed mother, among others. Eddy, a familiar face with sad expressions in many movies of the 1930s, is quite believable and natural as Sooky's struggling poor mother.

SKIPPY is a cute, simple, funny and heartwarming story focusing solely on children, something quite rare for that time, with the exception of comedy shorts featuring Hal Roach's Our Gang (or The Little Rascals). To enjoy this sort of tale about the true loyalty and friendship between two boys is to really love and understand children. Movies such as SKIPPY could also be related by those who had grown up in such an bygone era. Director Norman Taurog presents the children, not just its stars, as normal every day innocent kids. SKIPPY could very well been set in any time frame, any location, whether during the Tom Sawyer era of the 1800s, or pre or post World War I. In other words, kids will always be kids.

Aside from Jackie Cooper's fine performance, ranging from conniving, gentle and extremely tearful in that one climatic scene between him and his Dad, there is Robert ("Bobby") Coogan, the younger brother of Jackie Coogan, whose days as a top child star, which began in the early 1920s, were just about ending. Cute as he is natural, little Bobby Coogan comes very close in upstaging Cooper. So successful was SKIPPY, Paramount turned out an immediate sequel, SOOKY (1931) with the majority of the cast, minus Mitzi Green, reprising their roles.

Unseen for many years, both SKIPPY and SOOKY were resurrected during the early years of cable television's U.S.A. cable network way past the midnight hours around 1987 before turning up again on Retroplex in August 2010, and Turner Classic Movies where it premiered February 22, 2011.

Regardless of its age, SKIPPY is still timely, thanks to a literate script. For comedy, it delivers, For serious moments, it doesn't hold back. The crying scenes cannot actually be viewed without shedding at least one tear of emotion. As young as both Cooper and Coogan are, or were, they have presented themselves as real professional actors, or in better terms, common every day kids pretending to be somebody else, that as Skippy and Sooky. (****)

I couldn't quite give Skippy a 7. Close, but not quite. The film is like a Little Rascals episode only feature length, slightly more adult in atmosphere, and overall better written. One could look at Skippy as a glance back into what childhood looked like before the internet and really, before television. It isn't quite a perfect portrayal of those days, but it wouldn't be all that far off. Apparently, there is a companion piece, Sooky. If it should ever be shown on TCM, I'll make sure to see it. I say that as a nod to Skippy and its cast of kids, including Jackie Cooper, who 45 years later portrayed Clark Kent's boss, Perry White.

This constitutes one of the most surprising Oscar wins in history – the Best Direction nod for Taurog (reportedly, the youngest such recipient at the age of 32!) over heavyweights Lewis Milestone for THE FRONT PAGE (1931; who, by then i.e. the 4th ceremony, already had two statuettes to his name!) and Josef von Sternberg for MOROCCO (1930; the first of only two nominations for one of my dozen favourite auteurs!), both clearly superior films. Taurog was perhaps the epitome of the journeyman film- maker in Hollywood's Golden Age – showing a propensity for kiddie fare (such as SKIPPY and its unavailable inferior sequel made the same year, SOOKY, are), notably two BOYS' TOWN pictures (1938, for which he was also nominated, and 1941) and the Venice Film Festival winner(!) THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (also 1938), and musical comedies (suffice it to say that he ended his career directing resistible vehicles for the likes of Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley!).

Incidentally, SKIPPY was also seminal for having the first child performer to be nominated for acting (nine year-old Jackie Cooper, who happened to be Taurog's own nephew!): needless to say, the role made him a star…yet lasted just a few years at the top (though he formed a durable partnership with Wallace Beery) – not least because the market was subsequently flooded by other talented juveniles (Shirley Temple, Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, etc.). For the record, SKIPPY (which I had previously acquired a low-quality copy of, but did manage to upgrade some time back) was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (co-written by Norman Z. McLeod and Joseph L. Mankiewicz – both better-known as directors, though the latter would only move up the scale 15 years down the line).

Anyway, the film is a likable effort all round if hardly displaying outstanding merit at this juncture. Though a couple of them are overbearing (especially a girl with a penchant for yodeling!), the kids are practically the whole show here: apart from Cooper, easily the most effective is – the brother of famed child actor and later "Uncle Fester" incarnation Jackie – Robert Coogan (playing Sooky and actually top- billed during the opening credits, but rightfully listed below the protagonist when these are picked up at the coda!). Even cuter are the mongrels involved (which Sooky reasons are thus more "thoroughbred" than any pure breed!), around which the narrative partly revolves. The grown- ups are generally tyrannical (Skippy's health officer father – who intends demolishing the shantytown that is Sooky's home and to where his own boy frequently escapes), subservient (Cooper's mother) or just plain bullies (the local dog-catcher).

The latter picks up Sooky's unlicensed dog, so he and Skippy scrape for money to pay for one and retrieve the mutt – even going so far as to do the old "puttin'-on-a-show" routine before a hostile audience of friends – but they are still too late to save it! Sooky is understandably crushed, and Skippy – indirectly blaming his dad for authorizing the putting-down of stray animals – withdraws to his room; in reparation, the father buys him a bike, which he immediately trades for a dog to give Sooky…but, upon meeting him, discovers his pal has already filled the void (albeit with a bulldog)! The film offers drama and sentimentality galore, but also a few undeniable comic highlights – particularly the accidental repeated smashing of the dog-catcher's car windshield (the second time round by Skippy's own father!).