Andy Hardy Comes Home

Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958)

Mickey and son together for the first time

Andy Hardy, now a grown man with a wife and children, returns to his hometown on a business trip and finds himself getting mixed up in local politics.

Date of release
1958-12-22
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Howard W. Koch
Collection
Andy Hardy Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Andy Hardy Comes Home is a 1958 American comedy film directed by Howard W. Koch. It is the 16th and final film in the Andy Hardy series, with Mickey Rooney reprising his signature role. It was produced 12 years after the previous Hardy film, and was an attempt to revive what had once been an enormously popular film series. The film was a commercial failure, so Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not continue the series.

Production

Songwriter Robert Donley and journalist Edward Hushting wrote an original Andy Hardy synopsis on speculation and brought it to Rooney's agent, Red Doff. He showed it to Rooney, who was enthusiastic, and they pitched the project to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a co-production with Rooney's own company, Fryman Enterprises. The studio, then under the control of Joseph Vogel, agreed to make the film.

"We feel it's time for another Hardy picture", said Doff. "Time for a good, warm, wholesome family comedy – no violence, no monsters, no sex! There are millions who have seen and loved the Hardys – and who would like to see them again. And there are millions who never saw them on the big screen, but who are being presold by seeing them on TV. People like things nostalgic.

Lewis Stone, who had played the beloved Judge James Hardy in the previous films, had died in 1953 and his character's passing was portrayed in the film. Fay Holden, Sara Haden, and Cecilia Parker all reprised their roles of Emily Hardy, Aunt Milly and his sister Marian, respectively. (Parker had mostly retired from acting since the previous film in 1947, devoting herself to raising her children).

Mickey Rooney tried to persuade Ann Rutherford to return as Polly Benedict, Andy's on-and-off sweetheart in most of the original movies, so the two characters could be a married couple, but Rutherford's salary demands were too high, and the character was written out.

The flashback with Judy Garland was taken from the 1939 musical Babes in Arms, which was not part of the Andy Hardy series, with the name "Betsy Booth" dubbed in. That was the character's name in the Andy Hardy series but not the musical.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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