Oh, Those Little Rascals

Films: Skippy
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

A few years ago when I was starting to get into the short strokes on the 1001 Movies list, Chip Lary made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Send him a flashdrive, he said, and he’d fill it with movies that I couldn’t otherwise find. There’s no way I would have finished the full list without Chip’s assistance in finding those movies for me. Chip also included a few rarities and some hard-to-find Oscar movies. With my viewing of Skippy today, I’ve watched everything that Chip sent me for this blog. It’s a little sad, the end of an era.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when diving head-first into Skippy. Old movies, especially those from those first few years of sound, can be rough. When kids are the main characters, that problem can be compounded. Kids frequently can’t act, and back then, directors hadn’t really figured out how to get kids to act. Things are pretty amateurish much of the time. Since Skippy not only features kids but is focused on them as the main characters, that can mean some rough going.

Boys Town

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve mentioned WGN and Family Classics here before, and Boys Town is another film that showed up there at least once a year. It’s been years since I’ve seen this, but it’s also probably the sixth or seventh time I’ve seen it and the first time as an adult. I remembered a few key points but also forgot huge swaths of it, which is the primary reason I rewatch everything for this blog before posting about it.

Boys Town tells the story, partly realistic, of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy), a Catholic priest, who is called to a prison in the moments before a prisoner is put to death. He offers an impassioned speech about why he went bad, citing mostly the state homes he lived in as a child. This sparks something in Flanagan; when he returns home to Omaha, he immediately encounters a group of boys getting in trouble. At this point, Flanagan has run a home for transient men (read: hobos), but decides, based on the speech of the doomed prisoner, to switch his focus to the young. With the assistance of a local merchant, Flanagan buys a house to keep a group of boys under his protection and tutelage. Eventually, so many boys show up that Flanagan buys a large tract of property and creates an entire town run for and by the boys.