Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble

Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) starts Wainwright College, his father's alma mater. He gets into trouble with a couple of mischievous blonde twins and clashes with the dean (Herbert Marshall) over a pretty coed (Bonita Granville) both are attracted to.

Fourteenth entry in the Andy Hardy series. The last film from director George B. Seitz, who died a couple of months after this was released. Seitz had directed most of the Andy Hardy films up to this point. The Hardy series always had cute girls and this one is no exception. Bonita Granville is pretty and likable. Twins Lee and Lyn Wilde are absolutely adorable and very much steal the movie. Also features a crossover with the Dr. Gillespie series via the appearance of Keye Luke's Dr. Lee Wong Howe. The Hardy series and the Kildare/Gillespie series were MGM's best from the late '30s to the mid '40s so it's a nice bonus for fans of both.

One of the lesser Andy Hardy movies. It goes on too long and is in desperate need of some trimming. The movie spends about twenty more minutes on the train to the school than it needed to, plus too much time spent on new characters and too little time spent on the Hardy family back home. Anyway, it's still enjoyable, innocent fun. If you're a fan you're likely to be pleased. But this isn't a good jumping-on point for new viewers.

Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944)

** (out of 4)

Overlong, boring and overall disappointing fourteenth entry in the series finds Andy (Mickey Rooney) going to college at Wainright. On the train ride there he meets a woman (Bonita Granville) who is more mature than him and feels that Andy needs to grow up. Also on the train are a couple twins (Lee and Lyn Wilde) who Andy ends up helping. Back in Carver, the rest of the Hardy clan must try and come to terms with Andy being gone. At 107-minutes, this entry runs a good thirty-minutes too long but I'm going to guess part of the blame is on the pre-production. Originally this was meant to be a Rooney-less entry as the star was fighting in WWII so the studio did a screenplay without him. I'm going to guess that the stuff here dealing with the Hardy family on their own was from it and the stuff with Andy was added after he returned. The first thirty-minutes here were actually pretty good as Rooney and Granville had some nice chemistry and their relationship was an interesting one. I thought we also got some funny moments with the twins and a running joke of one constantly flirting with Andy while the other slaps him around; poor Andy not realizing they are twins. We even have another interesting subplot involving an older doctor (Herbert Marshall) and his questionable dealings with Granville. What doesn't work is when they finally arrive at college and things just get stretched out. The screenplay goes in so many directions that it's just downright silly, naive and in the end very boring. Things back in Carver aren't any better as the running joke comes from a Chinese doctor (Keye Luke) filling in for a sick doctor and everyone being shocked that he is a doctor due to his race. We see Judge (Lewis Stone) deal with a sore throat as well as a few more stories involving the broken down car that Andy started selling in the previous film, ANDY HARDY'S DOUBLE LIFE. It goes without saying that the entire cast is good and once again it was a real pleasure seeing Granville, best remembered for her Nancy Drew roles at Warner. The cast is certainly up to a high level but it's a shame the screenplay didn't try to do more.

This installment of the Andy Hardy series of films picks up where the last one left off. Andy is off to Wainwright College. On the train ride there, he meets another frosh-a female (Bonita Granville as Kay Wilson)-who tells him Wainwright is now coed (how convenient for young Hardy!). He also meets a flirty blonde whose erratic behavior is very confusing.

When Andy arrives at Wainwright, he deals with the usual frosh concerns, like uncertainty , then settles into his usual problems-girls and money. Kay is a challenge for small-town Andy; she seems to like older men. The problematic blonde (L. Wilde as L. Walker) brings out the chivalry in Andy.

The theme of this film is maturity. The rather subdued action fits the theme, with Andy becoming circumspect, learning to consider the perspectives of others.

Herbert Marshall acts with restraint as a man who may play a significant part in Andy's education.

"Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble" begins with Andy on a train bound for Wainwright College, as he just graduated high school in the previous film. The filmmakers made a poor choice here, as way too much of the story takes place aboard the train....making for a rather slow portion of the film. The bottom line is that he meets a lovely girl (Bonita Granville) and her guardian (Herbert Marshall) and strikes up a friendship....and not knowing that the guardian already knows Andy...or at least knows of him. Additionally, he meets two lovely blondes...not realizing they are identical twins and thinking they are one very odd girl. There's more to it than this but overall the story, while enjoyable, drags and certainly could have been better. Worth seeing if you love the series but not exactly a high point in the series.

By the way, if you do watch it note the character Dr. Lee (Keye Luke)...he plays the same exact character in another long-running MGM series...the Dr. Kildare/Dr. Gillespie films.

Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble is a surprisingly long film starring Mickey Rooney as a kid going to college. The woman he likes (Bonita Granville) prefers Herbert Marshall, the college dean, to Mickey Rooney. And no wonder - Rooney is 24 in this film but looks and sounds about 14, and Granville is 21 and is styled to look like she's in her mid 30s. In the first scene I thought the "twist" was going to be that she was a professor rather than a student.

As a result, visually, a Marshall-Granville romance is significantly more credible than a Rooney-Granville one, even though Marshall was 54. (The fact that he's the college dean and she is a freshman student never appears to be the slightest issue. Nor the fact that he's sleeping on the berth above her during the longest train journey since the Orient Express got stuck in the snow with a corpse).

Had they axed the rather contrived side plot about two identical blonde twins rinsing Rooney for cash, they could have made a shorter and tighter movie. Plus all the family scenes with Rooney's father could easily have been swept away on the cutting room floor. But this film is part of a series of Hardy family films, which I suppose is why they're in there.

There is one very touching scene with a Brooklyn-born Chinese American doctor, in dialogue very compelling for the 1940s (and even so today) he introduces himself with: "Oh I see you're wondering about my nationality. I'm Chinese, and I have a charming disposition, until someone pulls that old crack about 'Confucius say'. At which I go completely berserk and bite little children. Now let's have a look at that throat." Plus ça change, eight decades later.

I would recommend this film as a curiosity, and to fans of any specific actors in it. The twins can apparently sing, so it's rather a shame we don't get more of that.