Remembering Mickey Rooney
Everyone knows Mickey Rooney, but who really remembers the extent of his success? How many now living can testify not only to how large this man loomed over the American film landscape but also to the particular qualities that made him such an enormous success in his prime?
Everyone knows Rooney, who died at the great age of 93, precisely because he lived so long, the tireless last surviving star of Hollywood’s 1930s Golden Age, a performer always ready to make an appearance when there was a crowd waiting to applaud.
But Rooney was more than just any star. In the final innocent prewar years of 1939, 1940 and 1941, he was the country’s biggest box-office attraction, period, end of story. And the actor reached that pinnacle not by being a dashing action hero lead or a glamorous romantic lead, but by playing a teenage boy, a character one contemporary critic called “the perfect composite of everybody’s kid brother.” Nothing says more than that about how America’s popular culture movie tastes have changed in the interim.
Rooney wasn’t just any teenager either, he was brash, exuberant, unstoppable, the kind of kid Americans once upon a time liked to feel was representative of this country at its good-hearted, irrepressible best.
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