Belle jeunesse

Quite bland musical version of Eugene O'Neill's gentle comedy play about a family in rural America before the first world war.

MGM made the first (non-musical) version in 1935 under the play's original title, AH, WILDERNESS! That film, which stars Eric Linden, Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery is superb.

Here we get Mickey Rooney (aged 28 playing a high school senior), Walter Huston, and Frank Morgan. Huston and Morgan are OK, but Morgan can't hold a candle to Beery's Uncle Sid.

The rest of the cast here is competent but all the "edge" has been taken out of the original story. Agnes Moorehead plays the old maid aunt, Selena Royle is the mother, Gloria DeHaven is the girl next door, Butch Jenkins is the kid brother (Rooney played the role in the '35 film), and John Alexander plays the blowhard neighbor.

Not helping is the bland and forgettable music score. They would have been better off using real songs from the period.

The main problem is that Rooney is simply too old for this, and his acting is pretty bad. By 1948 he was already about to end his second marriage (first was to Ava Gardner). And here he is trying to play a virginal high schooler. It gets really sticky when he rebels and meets Belle.

In this version Belle is a chorus girl rather than a prostitute. Marilyn Maxwell is a breath of fresh air as the salty, plain-talking, overly made-up woman trying to take the green kid for a few bucks ... until another guy shows up. This is a nicely lit and interesting scene as Belle is "transformed" in Rooney's eyes from the cheap chorus girl into a colorful woman of the world. Maxwell is terrific. It's a great small role; in the '35 version Helen Flint was also terrific.

Bottom line is that this is just a so-so film. It can't compare with the '35 version of the story, and it certainly doesn't come up to the MGM standard for its '40s musicals. The movie was not a box office success.

"Ah, Wilderness!" should make a great musical--in fact, it made a very good one on Broadway, as "Take Me Along" in 1959--and this Freed Unit special has some greatness in it, which keeps being undercut. It's beautifully cast, the Technicolor is extraordinary, and the director, the always underrated Rouben Mamoulian, shows a lot of feel for the small-town turn-of-the-century setting and the small crises in the Miller family. But it was a troubled production, and it suffered some ruinous cuts. The editing's frankly sloppy, and misguided things happen that you don't expect to happen in MGM musicals. Mickey Rooney (10 years too old for the part, but he hides it well, and not doing those Mickey Rooney overacting things that often annoy me) and Gloria De Haven (lovely, with a lovely voice) dance fetchingly to "Afraid to Be in Love" on an emerald park lawn, and the number just fades out, no payoff, no resolution. Rooney gets drunk with Marilyn Maxwell in a cheap saloon, and there's supposed to be an Omar Khayam dream ballet (there are production stills), but it doesn't happen, and that scene, too, just fades out. The always-exemplary Walter Huston, who's charming here, rolls up the movie with the curtain line, "Well, spring isn't everything, is it, Essie?", and it's supposed to resonate because he was supposed to sing "Spring Isn't Everything," a sweet ballad similar to the "September Song" Huston introduced in "Knickerbocker Holiday," but that, too, has been cut, so it just seems an odd way to fade out. What's left of the Harry Warren-Ralph Blane score isn't great, but it's quite integrated into the action, and well performed. I caught this again on TCM recently and it's better than I remembered, but I keep wanting it to be better still.

With Mickey Rooney having died about a month ago, I went to the library to see if any of his films were there. I managed to find both this and Thoroughbreds Don't Cry there and checked them out. I just reviewed TDC so this is what I think of this one: It's quite good with the musical numbers and some of the atmosphere of both clean-cut small-town Americana and the more brassy charm of low-rent bars when the Rooney character goes to meet some dance hall girls and has an eye-popping' encounter with Marilyn Maxwell. Gloria DeHaven has her own wholesome charms as his girl-next-door partner. Walter Huston is fine as his wise father. And Frank Morgan is charismatic as his drunk uncle. The songs by Harry Warren and Ralph Blaine are tuneful enough. And the screenplay by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett-who also wrote my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life-has some nice humorous touches. Not great, but Summer Holiday was entertaining enough for me.

There are problems with this big-budget Arthur Freed production, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. It's a musical adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play, Ah, Wilderness!, which was first filmed by director Clarence Brown in 1935.

There's a good cast. You can't find much fault with people like Selena Royle, Agnes Moorehead, Frank Morgan, etc. But for a big MGM musical, Summer Holiday is underpopulated with song-and-dance talent. Marilyn Maxwell and Gloria DeHaven are real singers. Rooney, in the lead, is not. Huston (who had a hit record of September Song), has a few good musical minutes, but at least one of his songs was cut. And anyway, you can't expect Walter Huston to carry the male singing chores in a screen musical.

Mickey did star in musicals before this. But he probably shouldn't have been expected to carry this kind of film. He was a huge talent, but as a musical lead, he was a different type, a showman (as he proved in the hit Broadway show, Sugar Babies, years later). He wasn't a song and dance man, like Donald O'Connor. You don't find yourself eagerly awaiting his next vocal or dance number.

As for his being too old, he is. But even when he was a lot younger, he just wasn't really the type to pull off this naive, bumptious character. He's a good actor, he tries, and he does well, overall. It's just that I didn't buy it and you probably won't, either.

The songs are good, but they don't have a lot of zing. They're pleasant. The numbers themselves are sometimes truncated. The cuts are rather obvious, at times.

The thing I enjoyed most was the recreation of various American paintings (like Grant Wood's American Gothic) in one sequence. It was both charming and satirical.

By the way, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but director Rouben Mamoulian chose to have the costumes and sets done almost entirely in whites, light grays, tans, and other soft, neutral tones. I'm guessing this was in order to contrast with the film's colorful Omar Kiam fantasy sequence.

But the sequence was cut, resulting in a colorless, drab-looking Technicolor film. Only the scene with Marilyn Maxwell, whose costume becomes more flamboyant the more drunk Mickey Rooney gets, remains as a contrast to all that colorlessness.

Mamoulian was clearly a man of talent, and his cast and technical crew were the finest the studio could provide, so it's a shame to report this film was less than the sum of its parts.

If you are a fan of Mickey Rooney, or if you loved "Ah, Wilderness!" (1935 movie) and "Take Me Along" (Broadway musical version of "Ah, Wilderness!"), you will find this version of Eugene O'Neill's only comedy worth seeing.

Mickey Rooney is in both films. In "Summer Holiday," he does a good job as the older brother, but I liked him better as the little brother in the 1935 movie. Butch Jenkins plays the little brother in "Summer Holiday" (the Mickey Rooney role in the 1935 movie). Somebody must have decided the role was not cute enough, so they gave poor little Butch a lot of extra lines and cutesy costumes. Remembering Mickey's robust performance in the earlier version, I found Butch embarrassing.

The music in "Summer Holiday" is not very inspired. "Take Me Along" has better songs. I don't dislike "Summer Holiday." It just doesn't live up to my expectations of it.