Synopsis
It's Mickey's All-Time Topper!
An American playboy is sent to a British boarding school to learn discipline.
A Yank at Eton
1942 Directed by Norman Taurog
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Alternative Titles
Un americano a Eton, Un yanqui en Eton, De Cartola e Calças Listradas
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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USA
Releases by Country
USA
01 Sep 1942
- Theatrical
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Normally our insight into the contemporary reception of films is limited to the professional reviewers. However, by the time these films were released, America was at war and an America at war needed an Office of War Information (OWI). Hollywood was to be included and by March 1942 there was a Hollywood office for both the domestic and the overseas branches of OWI. Staffed by committed New Deal internationalists, these offices immediately began to assess the contribution made by films – features, shorts, cartoons and newsreels – to the war effort, and their reports provide some fascinating contemporary evaluations. Journey for Margaret was praised as an example of to “what splendid purpose films can be used to further the understanding…
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Norman Taurog’s comedy-drama in which a gifted high school football player has concern getting used to life at a well-known English school. Stars Mickey Rooney, Edmund Gwenn and Ian Hunter.
Throughout the Second World War, an American boy called Timothy Dennis (Mickey Rooney) is unenthusiastically referred to Eton College in the United Kingdom, where he is repeatedly confused by the number of differences between the two nations.
Mickey Rooney gives a good performance in his role as the American student who doesn’t want to go to Eton in the United Kingdom, but has do to so (because of the ongoing war, the movie was shot entirely in the United States as the UK was at conflict with Germany).
Elsewhere, Edmund…
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I am not sure exactly why, but this film irritated me from start to finish. Everything about it. Maybe because it was made in 1942 and the world was at war and you would never know it from this film. But I was thinking, what mother would have her two children come over to England on a liner with U-boats hunting ships in the Atlantic. Here is Mickey Rooney playing a high school student again while in real life he is married to Ava Gardner (and cheating on her). He is the halfback on the football team planning to go to Notre Dame and be an All-American. Rooney was 5'2''. I know people were smaller back then, but halfback on…
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Essentially Andy Hardy goes to Eton, as Mickey Rooney's default troublemaker character heads off to England. What separates this from the actual Andy Hardy films is that I think he's actually mostly in the right at first and gradually abandons that to get out of trouble. He pushes back about the byzantine heirarchy and 'tradition' of Eton while also being less than thrilled that he and his sister are being moved to a new country over a sudden marriage. The latter is more of a 'time' thing, but I don't think he's wrong about the former.
There's some more entertaining bits in here, but there's not anything satisfying about the triumphs of Mickey Rooney for me, and this doesn't rise above that. I know that was apparently America's big thing for like a decade, but it just doesn't work for me.
The whole thing is just grating.
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Mickey Rooney in school was usually a success on screen, but being sent to a British boarding school was a UK-American culture crash. Sure, Rooney brings life the way only he knew how, but him at Eton wasn't really working to full effect. You had some fun moments, but the moral and all that.... nah.
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Weird to see Freddie Bartholomew in a movie where someone else is basically playing "young Freddie Bartholomew character." Otherwise this is basically Lord Jeff again, but backwards and with an underexplored remarriage plot leading to the incongruous school situation rather than the more interesting "young con artist with split loyalties" bit there. Rooney also goes pretty full Rooney here, which... well, it's something.
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What a difference four years makes! In 1938’s Lord Jeff, Freddie Bartholomew played a snotty teen forced to attend a school he hated, and Mickey Rooney played a “regular follow” who helped get Bartholomew off his high horse. Here, their roles are reversed. Rooney plays an American with a case of reverse snobbery, and Bartholomew is his down-to-earth stepbrother. Rooney had become a huge box-office draw and supplanted Bartholomew as MGM’s go-to juvenile lead, thanks in part to Boys Town (another variation on this formula). Bartholomew had moved down the studio ladder to less prestigious Universal and Columbia. This was his last MGM film.
Apart from how it illustrates the vagaries of Hollywood stardom, I don’t really care for this…
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Favorite Scene: Whenever Mickey Rooney hollers and hoos like an insane person. Love that man.
Shot by Karl Freud & Charles Lawton Jr.
Shot on 35 mm