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Love Finds Andy Hardy

Posted : 4 years, 9 months ago on 27 June 2019 04:52

Small town American was never as picture perfect and saccharine as it was in the Andy Hardy series. There’s the stoic but supportive father (Lewis Stone), fretful loving mother (Fay Holden), nicely combative older sister (Cecilia Parker), and Andy, the teenager on the right side of mischief-making (Mickey Rooney). They’re a postcard family in sitcom-level conundrums that feel stretched out to accommodate the 80-plus running times of their films.

 

Love Finds Andy Hardy is probably the most famous entry in the franchise, if for no other reason than the appearances of Judy Garland and Lana Turner, both on the cusp of superstardom. It’s also a quaint little charmer that’s all Norman Rockwell Americana and innocent shenanigans involving an irrepressible teenager boy. It’s a silly little thing that alternates between giving you a cavity with its sugarcoated homespun imagery and charming with its naivete.

 

Andy wants to buy a car, but he’s short the $8 dollars necessary to pay it off. His friend offers him a compromise: entertain his girlfriend (Lana Turner, the safest naughty girl imaginable) during the Christmas break while he’s gone, and he’ll give Andy the missing $8 as a thank you. There’s naturally complications, including the reappearance of Andy’s girlfriend Polly (Ann Rutherford, all wide-eyed sweetness), the introduction of Betsy (Garland), a poor little rich girl that’s got a crush on the uninterested Andy, and some light familial drama that functions as time waster and stretching of the thin narrative to feature length. Everything wraps up neatly by the time the final credits roll around and we’re off to the next entry/misadventure of Andy.

 

Love Finds Andy Hardy is best when we ignore the other family members and just zero in on Andy’s quest for girls, cars, and a good time. I swear, if you threw in rock and roll and surf, this thing could easily restructure into a late 50s/early 60s idyllic teenage movie. It probably did and just swapped out Andy for Gidget, let’s be real.

 

Back to the movie at hand. Rooney’s a horny cartoon around Lana Turner, who pouts and seduces with alacrity even at this early age. He’s a chaste neighborhood kid around Ann Rutherford’s Polly, a long-suffering girlfriend type that seems primed to knock him on his ass at any moment. But Rooney’s best around Garland’s Betsy as her wide-eyed vulnerability brings out a gentleness in the actor and character that provides honest emotion to poke through the glossy, sugary veneer. Garland nearly steals the movie from him with her authentic performance and knack for comedy.

 

It all just goes breezing by until order is once more restored. The family conflicts are smoothed over, Polly and Andy are reunited, Betsy manages to set everything right, and the big Christmas dance provides some magic in the form of Garland’s singing. Love Finds Andy Hardy is a lovely little thing, but proof that too much sweetness can be detrimental after a while.  



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