Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940)

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
Directed by George B. Seitz
Written by Aurania Rouverol, Tom Seller, and Annalee Whitmore
1940/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Streaming on Amazon Instant Video

[box] Andrew ‘Andy’ Hardy: [In reference to Ulysses S. Grant] He didn’t have trouble like I got, all he had on his hands was a civil war.[/box]

I took this one out of sequence in memory of Mickey Rooney who died on April 6.  It had everything one would expect from an Andy Hardy movie with an extra dose of patriotism thrown in to reflect the war in Europe.

Andy (Rooney) has a crush on a photogenic young debutante, clipping all her photos from the gossip magazines.  He boasts to Polly that he has met her.  Then Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) decides to take his family to New York where he is going to defend the local orphanage.  Polly calls his bluff threatening to humiliate Andy in the school paper if he does not produce a picture of himself with the celebrity.  All of Andy’s efforts to actually meet the girl get him in hot water.  But Betsy Blair (Judy Garland) comes to the rescue and gets an early screen kiss.  With all the Andy Hardy regulars.

Rooney is his peppy self in this movie, lording it over others when he is not bemoaning his fate.  His complaints about lacking “class” and money earn him a long talking to from his father extolling the American Way.  The sub-plot about the orphans involves their trustee trading in U.S. bonds for European ones and then losing his shirt on them when the war starts, with resultant commentary by the Judge on the folly of deserting ones country. We get a couple of songs from Garland, neither too memorable.

Trailer