Andy Hardy gets a bit sick of Polly and wants to dump her – but she gets in first. No matter, Andy has fallen in love with a famous debutante (played by Diana Lewis, who didn't become famous but who did marry William Powell), a girl famous for looking pretty and wearing dresses, which gives the story some unexpectedly modern resonance. As if to compensate for this, the film pours on the sexism – when Andy says he wants a woman like Cleopatra, Judge pitches for the old fashioned type of girl and argues Cleopatra destroyed every man who fell in love with her. Ma Hardy likes Judy Garland because she’s not afraid to be a homemaker. And Ma, Marian and Milly are shunted to the side – all the action is on Andy and the Judge.
Ok that’s not entirely fair – Judy Garland is back. The family heads to New York, where Judge can help save an orphanage (the syrup factor was really high in the series by now), meaning the family and renew it’s acquaintance with Judy Garland. Garland is touching and frenetic as the girl with a yen for Andy and sings a few songs.
There’s a nice correlation of the stories in that both Judge and Andy encounter snobbery on the trip – Judge in the courtroom. Andy can’t handle it and whinges, causing Judge to take him for a walk to the Hall of Fame, and point out all the great men who made American a free place for men – Jackson, Lincoln, etc. (No mention of blacks or women. Andy isn’t inspired and Judge calls him stupid.)
For the first time in the series, Andy actually asks his mother for help in something, to help get an introduction to the girl – she dithers and she steers him in the direction of an etiquette book. She spends a lot of time worried she’s burnt the house down. Great advertisement for women’s rights, Ma Hardy. Surprisingly, Marian isn’t given a plot – you’d thought New York would have been a natural place for her to fall in love with someone inappropriate but maybe MGM were getting sick of that story.
Some of the material here is strong: Judy pining after Andy, Andy going to a fancy restaurant. (Andy is always getting into financial strife, but you know what – so was his dad.) There’s also a really sweet climax, where the debutante turns out to be quite nice and tries to help Judy get Andy, and a lovely scene in a horse-drawn cab where Andy kisses Judy and she cries. (She wouldn’t get any less neurotic over the rest of her life.)
There’s some enjoyable dodgy subtext when Judge produces an orphan in the court case, and the opposition lawyer takes a shine to him and takes him home. “I’ll have him home by sundown,” he says. What’s he going to do to that orphan?!
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