Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)

Film: Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)
Stars: Lewis Stone, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Cecilia Parker, Fay Holden, Lana Turner, Ann Rutherford
Director: George B. Seitz
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Lana Turner-click here to learn more about Ms. Turner (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Despite urban legend, Lana Turner was not discovered in Schwab's Pharmacy.  The definitive version of how the screen icon was discovered will probably never be definitively known, but we can chart the earlier part of her filmography regardless.  She worked briefly at Warner Brothers, but her career was going nowhere, and so director Mervyn LeRoy, her mentor, brought her with over to MGM with little complaint (akin to the Red Sox trading Babe Ruth, if film fans were akin to such analogies).  While at MGM she got her first real break as a screen actress in the oddest place of all-Love Finds Andy Hardy, a movie that didn't quite catapult her to stardom, but did put her into a newer echelon of actress-someone whom studio executives suddenly knew the name of and wanted to see her stretch in more substantial parts.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Andy Hardy (Rooney), an all-American boy who is trying to save up enough money to take his girl Polly (Rutherford) to the dance.  However, when Polly can't go to the dance, Andy still wants to go by himself, and continues saving for the car.  When a friend convinces Andy to date his girlfriend Cynthia (Turner), in hopes of making sure Cynthia isn't swept off-her-feet by other boys, Andy has to trick Polly, a problem that is compounded when it turns out Polly can go to the dance.  Andy thus has to find a way to please both girls, and is aided in this by Betsy (Garland), who is a few years younger than Andy but is terribly smitten with him.  This all happens while Andy's mother (Holden) is off caring for his ailing grandmother, and so for much of the film Andy is being raised by his father Judge Hardy (Stone) and his older sister Marian (Parker)

Love Finds Andy Hardy is an odd film to associate with Lana Turner's eventually sexy, blonde goddess persona for a variety of reasons, but first of all it's a strange picture in general for us to profile here because it's the fourth film in a series of movies I haven't seen any of the other movies.  I normally wouldn't do something like that (I tend to favor seeing the story in the original order), but these serials were so popular in the days before television, and aren't really like the sequels we encounter today.  Instead, they're more like an episode of television, and so checking in on the Hardy family (the series would ultimately have sixteen excursions, as well as a short) seems more like seeing an episode of I Love Lucy or The Dick van Dyke Show out-of-sequence than missing Empire before going into Jedi.

The movie itself is kind of frothy.  This is wholesome family entertainment in a way we'd almost exclusively associate with television (think Ozzie & Harriet or The Donna Reed Show for context), but it's not particularly rapid fire and the jokes are far too genial to be funny years later.  Some of them are a little gross (there's a crack about Andy kissing Polly, even when she doesn't want to, that will have your antennae up pretty quickly), and there's not a lot of great slapstick or sight gags to make these compelling.  That said, it's not a bad movie either.  Rooney is fun as Andy-you see pretty quickly why this series made him a household name, and Garland is winning as Betsy, getting to sing a few ballads and the two have smashing chemistry with each other.  I'm going with 3-stars here because if you don't attach a genre to the movie (like, "comedy," and suddenly expect a laugh riot), it's fun.  It's just not the sort of thing that exists on-screens today where first you pitch the trailer, then the movie.

As for Turner, I'm going to be honest-I'm at a loss how she became a star off of this.  Her part is small, and while she's fun as a girl who will "let you kiss her all she wants" (Turner is basically the "trampy girl" trope where you know she won't end up with sweet-hearted Andy), it's hard to imagine what she'd graduate to just a few short years later.  Turner's so young here (just seventeen), and there are even cracks about the future sex symbol's appearance being less than ideal (particularly about her "red hair")-it's an odd chapter in the career of such a major star, and such a complete departure from what we'd normally associate with her that I'm glad we took this early detour in her career.  Next week, though, we'll get to one of the quintessential Lana Turner roles.