The Devil Is A Sissy/ Everything's Ducky

Occasionally I'm seeing a listing on Turner Classic Movies that has potential. The Devil Is A Sissy had an interesting title. It's from 1936 and stars Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper. Freddie Bartholemew is an English kid who's living with his dad in a small apartment in New York City. Dad just got a divorce  and he's having Freddie live with him for 6 months. We don't see mom until the end of the movie, seems she's rich and one of those people that likes the jetset life. Freddie's just happy to be with his dad, he doesn't even want to go back to mom but that's the settlement. Mickey's playing a kid with a dad who's up the river waiting to get juiced for murder. It's pretty tramatic for the kid when 9pm comes the fateful day they throw the switch. He can hear his mom screaming up in the apartment from down on the steps of their tenament. Jackie Cooper is a pal of Mickey's, they have a little gang of kids. Freddie is new to the area and he's going to a new school. He wants to fit in with the rather tough boys he meets and has to take a few knocks. He's a tough little bird who gets acceptance from the gang when he doesn't snitch about a broken window at school. He even lies and said he threw the ball. The adults don't actually believe he did it, expecially when Mickey and Jackie swear they didn't do anything. They already have established reputations in the neighborhood. Of course the boys get in some worse trouble when Freddie sets up a huge toy robbery. He doesn't tell the boys that it's his mother's posh house and the toys are all his toys. He didn't want them stealing tires to raise the 80 bucks Mickey wants for a tombstone for his dad. A tombstone with an Angel on it. They wind up in the juvenile court of Jonathan Hale. I'm a fan of Mr. Hale, he's a good character actor, and it turns out he's a Canadian. Nice, huh. I have enjoyed watching him as Inspector Henry Furnack in The Saint movies from the 1930's. He can play serious or comic. That's him with the kids. He gets to the heart of the story right quick and tries to set the boys on the right road. He claims the Devil is a sissy and being good is hard work but rewarding. Not something that the whimpy Devil can do. Pretty big concept for these young kids and they resist. Poor Freddie, already on the right path, nearly has to die to help Mickey and Jackie find their way. Oh, yeah, being kidnapped by some worse criminals and nearly murdered, that might have helped too. There's a happy ending, Jackie and Mickey have finished their probation, the three kids are best pals and they have new bikes, and dad looks to have a new squeeze.

The movie was directed by WS Van Dyke. He started directing in 1917 and might be most famous for directing The Thin Man and two of the sequels. The Thin Man is certainly in my top group of movies. I have watched it many times over the last 40 plus years. After a lot of silent films Van Dyke made a fair number of talkies before he died in 1943 at age 53. I enjoyed Trader Horn, the 1932 Tarzan The Ape Man, Cairo, and Manhattan Melodrama. A lot of the other ones I haven't seen. I might avoid watching a drama when I have a choice to watch anything more fun. I thought I would take a chance on TDIAS and I am pretty glad I did. The script portraits a good bunch of characters in nice tight scenes. The movie was written by John Lee Mahin, and Richard Schayer, both of whom have written some pretty darn good films over the years. The story for The Devil Is A Sissy was written by Rowland Brown who followed that with a similar story for Angels With Dirty Faces. I'm not a Cagney fan and that movie is way to melodramatic for me to want to revisit. There was some uncredited script work by Frank Fenton, who wrote a lot of stuff for Hollywood. The work I have seen is a pretty mixed bag. There's the 1936 Step Lively, Jeeves which is no way captures what P.G. Wodehouse was doing in his Jeeves and Wooster stories. He did a couple of The Saint films and three of The Falcon. They are fairly good light hearted crime stories with fun characters and good scripts. I have watched those many times. I probably won't watch TDIAS very often but that's ok. It's not taking up much space on the dvdr.

I like like putting a couple of movies on a dvdr, especially when they are older shorter black and white movies. They look good enough for me. There's wasn't much that I didn't have, or didn't want to see, that day but Everything's Ducky looked like it might be fun, so I put that on as 'take a chance' filler. It's a movie with Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, and a duck. Jackie Cooper makes a brief appearance as a psychiatrist. I don't think I had seen it before. It came out in Dec 1961 which is about the time we were heading to Churchill. It's often called the Polar Bear Capitol Of The World. The movie theater there ran a new movie every 2 days and while they were new pictures, they were usually months old by the time they arrived in the frozen Canadian north. It could have been playing there during the time I lived there and I would have wanted to see it. My mom worked late on friday. She'd meet us at home for her dinner break, we just lived around the corner, Churchill isn't very big. After a quick dinner we'd head back to the store with her. Mom would give an 9 year old me a dollar and I would take my 5 year old bother Clyde along to the theater to catch the first evening show. There wasn't any tv there at that time, so the movie theater had to be our babysitter. Can't think of a better one. We'd get in to the movie for 35 cents each and use the other 15 cents to get a pop and a chocolate bar or popcorn to munch on. We'd hit the same theater on saturday for the children's matinee and that was only 25 cents to get in. An extra dime for snacks. More than half the kids in the town would show up. When the movie was over on Friday we'd cross the town square and wait at the store that mom worked in for her to get done for the night. Then we'd all walk home together and tell mom about the movie. I guess old habits die hard.

 
Mickey, who's now 40, and Buddy, who's only 36, are sailors on a submarine buried in the sands of the California desert. It's really a mockup for the testing of sub based missles. They aren't very good at their job which is why they are stuck there. Their CO gives them a special job. Picking up a duck from the lab of a dead military scientist. The duck isn't eating and the CO thinks that putting the duck with other ducks might give it some life again. Turns out the duck can talk and he has a taste for booze. Mickey and Bubby figure they can make money with bar bets. I mean what else are you going to do with a talking duck. The military figure out that the duck is something they need. They think he might have a tiny guidance in his head. He doesn't. What's in his head is the special rocket formula. Mickey and Buddy take a liking to the duck and try to protect him. There are some comic moments but some of them aren't so good. Kind of like the black and white poster above. Not so good, huh. Much of the promo material seems poor to me, especially that color lobby card. Not a great movie, that's for sure. I won't need to watch it much in the future. Glad I didn't buy a copy, blowing 15 cents on half a dvdr isn't too bad.