Yesterday I cleaned house and caught up on laundry and watched Andy Hardy movies on TCM. Talk about your feel good movies!!
Maybe people like Judge and Mrs. Hardy and their son Andy never truly existed, but I was comforted to think life might have been like that at some lost, past time. Andy's teenage rebellions were mild, and always respectful, with no physical or verbal violence. His worries and anxieties resolved themselves painlessly through the support of family and friends. The Hardy home was warm and loving, the parents calm and nurturing. They taught their son by example how life should be lived. None of Andy's peers were suicidal or homicidal. None fancied themselves to be vampires, goths, or hit men. Nobody lived in fear of home invasions or car jackings.
Oh, I know the Andy Hardy series were only movies about imaginary people. What a blessed relief it must have been to go to movies back in those days, to enjoy well-adjusted people interacting in character driven plots without murders and explosions. Maybe it's my age creating such longings to live in softer times. Maybe children were never safe and life was not blithely peaceful. Or perhaps movie makers knew a secret then that their modern peers have overlooked: People like to feel happy and safe, nurtured and serene and accepted.
Thanks for yesterday, Andy Hardy, and for softening the edges of a chaotic world.
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About Me
- Laurel Johnson
- I enjoy good writing by writers and poets who are not famous. My mother said I was born a hundred years too late. The older I get, the more I realize how right she was.
1 comment:
Hi, Laurel,
I was reading a poem on-line by the terrific Christina Pacosz (http://qarrtsiluni.com/2007/11/26/counting-monarchs-in-kansas-city/#comment-1763) and saw that you commented on it, and remembered the wonderful review you wrote of my book Lightning and Ashes.
Thank you again for that.
Reading this entry about Andy Hardy brought back a lot of memories for me. Andy was one of my favorites when I was growing up. I sought his films out whenever I could.
One of my favorite films with Mickey Rooney, the actor who played Andy, is the MGM film The Human Comedy. It's based on a work by the great William Saroyan. Mickey plays a sort of Andy Rooney character, but it's set during World War II.
What the film has are all those strong values the Andy Hardy films have, but they are played out in a darker world that is on the edge of chaos.
It is really a moving film, one that -- like Christina Pacosz's poem -- teachs us the value of what persists in the human heart.
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