Andy Hardy Meets Debutante

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
July 5, 1940
MGM
Comedy
VHS
C+

This is the ninth out of sixteen Andy Hardy movies, although the only one I own.  I've seen a couple others, and while I'm definitely not a fan, it was worth picking up the tape for less than $1.  And, yes, that's the title, not "a debutante" or "the debutante," just "debutante," as if it's a newspaper heading.  In a plot that somewhat resembles the 1942 introduction of Veronica in the Archie comics, small-town typical 17-year-old boy Andy claims he knows his crush, New York debutante Daphne Fowler, but of course he doesn't.  Never mind that he already has a girlfriend, or that loyal friend Betsy has a crush on him.

Andy's girl-craziness is particularly appropriate for Mickey Rooney, who would go on to eight marriages.  Several of the lines are extra amusing in retrospect:  "I'll live and die a bachelor," "Love again, Andy?", "How one's women do mount up," and "That's not glamour, that's polygamy!"  Andy isn't a very sympathetic character, not so much because of how he chases girls (Archie has managed to be sympathetic for over 70 years), as the way he treats people in general, until he starts to learn his lessons, including civics lessons.  I was also annoyed with him teaching a little boy to be macho and slangy, for unfunny comic relief.  Luckily, there's Judy as Betsy.  She is almost as likable as she was as Dorothy the previous year, and she manages to redeem "Alone," the over-used love song of A Night at the Opera.  However, it and the song that wins over Andy, "I'm Nobody's Baby," are actually depressing if you pay attention to the lyrics.

Ethelreda Leopold was in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man and The Wizard of Oz.  Addison Richards, who was the judge in My Little Chickadee, plays George Benedict here.  Buddy Messinger is an elevator boy again.  George Lessey, who plays Underwood, the rival lawyer, would soon be the Railroad President in Go West, while Diana Lewis (Daphne) would be Eve Wilson in that movie.  (She was Miss Dunk in It's a Gift.)  Thomas Pogue would go on to Citizen Kane.