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Wednesday's Child: Jackie "Butch" Jenkins

8/13/2014

Jack Dudley Jenkins, August 29, 1937 to August 14, 2001

Got In and Got Out.

Finally. A kid with good parents.

If you've seen a picture with Jackie "Butch" Jenkins in it (and you have), you'll remember him as the most natural child on the screen. In my (and Pauline Kael's) opinion, he's the best thing about The Human Comedy and the only thing that makes me want to watch Margaret O'Brien* at all, but especially in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes.

He was funny-looking, completely unaffected, and believable as the bigger name's younger brother, even if one of those stars is Elizabeth Taylor and the other is Mickey Rooney, because yeah, they could be related. By the time he was 11, Jenkins had made 13 pictures -- four of them with James Craig -- then up and quit after he developed a nervous stutter. His mother, actress Doris Dudley, took him out before the business further screwed him up and invested the money he made for him, so that he was quite well off by the time he was in his thirties.

Jenkins lived happily in Texas for many years and became a successful non-show-businessman. He said that he never regretted leaving films and was "very grateful to my mother for taking me away from it...There may be a better way to live than on a lake with a couple of cows, a wife, and children but being a movie star is not one."

"Butch" Jenkins died August 14, 2001 in his sleep at his home in Asheville, North Carolina just a few weeks before his 64th birthday.

A pretty happy ending.

* Before people start bugging me for picking on poor little Margaret O'Brien, I just want to say she's never been my cup of tea. She's a perfectly lovely woman who is very generous with her time and I enjoyed hearing her speak on the TCM Classic Movie Cruise last year. But I'm not a fan of her work.

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MGM Blogathon: The Human Comedy (1943)

6/28/2014

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Uber-sweet, but worth it.

Cloying, but Comforting

My memory of this film is fonder than it should be. It appeals to me because Mickey Rooney is restrained and affecting in it and certain scenes were etched in my memory from the first time I saw it on television a thousand years ago.

But I forgot about the soundtrack. And the harp. And the platitudes. And the dripping sentimentality. Oh god, and the folk dancing -- THAT slipped my mind. But if all I retained, lo these many years, is Rooney's truly excellent performance, the cinematography, the sudden overwhelming grief brought on by a wartime telegram, and Jackie "Butch" Jenkins generally, maybe it's worth the slog through molasses.

The story opens under the narration of the late Matthew Macauley (Ray Collins) who soothes us with the idea that although he is dead, his "self" lives on in the places he frequented, the town he called home (mythical, allegorical, Ithaca, California) and the family he left behind: 6-year-old Ulysses (Butch Jenkins), high schooler Homer (Mickey Rooney), next oldest Bess (Donna Reed), eldest son, Marcus (Van Johnson), a private in the US. army about to go to combat, and wife Kate (Fay Bainter).

Now that dad's dead and Marcus has joined the army, Homer is the "man" of the house and has recently taken a job at the local telegraph office. His boss is sturdy, up-and-comer, Tom Spangler (James Craig), who used to be Ithaca's 220 low hurdle champion, but who now runs the Western Union office and keeps the telegraph operator, drunken, world-weary old man Grogan (Frank Morgan) in coffee and pie. Spangler is also engaged to Diana something-or-other (Marsha Hunt), a frivolous debutante, who is in this movie, one supposes, to show us that all classes are sacrificing for the war and that the rich are people too. She also gets to comment on the quaint folk dancing during the "It's a Small World" portion of the film that showcases the melting pot that is America. One feels for Marsha Hunt.

It's Homer's job to deliver telegrams all over town -- the sad as well as the singing ones -- to keep Mr. Grogan sober enough to type out the messages as they come in, and to be on the receiving end of whatever lengthy pearls of wisdom come from an adult's mouth. Could be his teacher, Mr. Spangler, his dear mother, why, even a soldier on leave. Everyone has something to impart.

The soldiers are all fine young men: they sing hymns and think about their mothers or their girls, even when three of them (a super young Robert Mitchum, Barry Nelson, and Don DeFore) meet Bess and her friend Mary (Marcus's fiancée) and take them to the movies. No monkey business or threat of impropriety; this isn't Crossfire. And here's a bit of cinephilia: the hymn all the boys sing together on the transport train is the same one older Robert Mitchum sings menacingly throughout Night of the Hunter some years later. Telling...

But it was 1943, smack in the middle of the war (for the U.S. anyway) and lots of young people were heading off to possibly die, certainly to be forever changed, leaving families and friends behind. I'd like to think this movie made people feel better about the worry. Some of it is beautiful and painful, and some of it is maudlin and corny, but in spite of feeling socked in the face every so often with a bag of maple syrup, this movie makes me cry and makes me hope that audiences in 1943 watching it cried together and felt like maybe all their hardships were worth it.

But seriously, a harp?

This post is my entry for the MGM Blogathon, sponsored by Silver Scenes.

Please check out all the fabulous posts by other classic movie bloggers: More stars than there are in heaven.

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Farewell, Mickey Rooney

4/7/2014

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Mr. Mickey Rooney (Joseph Yule, Jr.) September 20, 1920 - April 6, 2014

I'm Going to Miss the Little Guy

There will be much written about Mickey Rooney over the next few days, and I won't have anything spectacular to add. I was never a huge fan of the madcap, singing, dancing Mickey Rooney, but preferred the quieter, brotherly, small town entrepreneurial Mickey Rooney.

I liked the guy who was sweet to Virginia Weidler (Young Tom Edison), Freddie Bartholomew (Captains Courageous), and drunk Frank Morgan (The Human Comedy) and I *always* cried when he did.

Mickey Rooney was probably the last of the working vaudevillians we'll ever see again. He did everything it was possible to do in show business and was a massive success at it for 90 years. To me, his greatest achievement was his marriage to Ava Gardner, because, really? And he'll always have a soft spot in my heart for being the winning answer to one of my sister's Daily Doubles on Jeopardy in 1987.

I suppose we all knew this would happen one day, but I'm still very sad to see him go.

May you rest in peace, Mr. Rooney. You did a marvelous job.