Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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I’m trying to describe the first two and a half minutes of Martin Arnold’s creepy 15-minute experimental film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), but I can’t be confident that my account is either complete or entirely accurate. For one thing, the somewhat stocky, stolid older woman Andy Hardy kisses may not be his mother; theoretically it could be his Aunt Milly, another character in the series. I know that MGM released 15 Andy Hardy pictures between 1937 and 1946–7 in 1938 and 1939 alone–and a final one in 1958. But with the possible exception of the last, I don’t believe I’ve seen any of them apart from occasional snatches while channel surfing. I’m not even sure which of the Andy Hardy features furnished the extracts for this film–assuming it was only one–though the presence of Judy Garland in later segments of Alone narrows the possibilities to three: Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), and Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) (Garland plays a character named Betsy Booth in all of them).
Arnold–an Austrian who manipulates fragments of black-and-white Hollywood features through optical printing and editing–is presenting a program of his films, including Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, on Friday, February 18, at Columbia College’s Ferguson Hall through the auspices of Kino-Eye Cinema. Two earlier items on the program are described as parts of a trilogy with Alone, though they seem to me merely setting-up exercises by comparison: neither packs the same punch, establishing most of Arnold’s procedures but doing much less with them. These films lack Alone’s narrative and internal complexity–its ability to connect a good many scenes and characters while actually telling a story part of the time.
All this unnervingly dehumanizes the actors as well as the characters they’re playing. Arnold’s distortions remind us of the mechanical nature of film projection, which we take for granted as representing reality: altering this mechanism can turn people into inhuman geeks at the drop of a hat. Alone carries this principle even further–most notably with Judy Garland’s singing, which moves in and out of recognizable as well as freakish registers–and makes its point even more effectively by allowing us to comprehend a few of the words being uttered by Garland, Rooney, and an unidentified actor. (Indeed the title, Alone, comes from one repeated recognizable portion of her song.)
Neal Gabler in his persuasive 1988 book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (which offers a much better argument than the oversimplified 1997 TV documentary based on it, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream) suggests that the Hardy films can be seen as the propagandistic version of the American dream that evolved out of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer’s denial of his European Jewish roots. Gabler cites Billy Wilder’s recollection of a scene at MGM while he was scripting Ninotchka: “‘We looked out the window because there was screaming going on, and Louis B. Mayer held Mickey Rooney by the lapel. He says, “You’re Andy Hardy! You’re the United States! You’re the Stars and Stripes. Behave yourself! You’re a symbol!”‘”
