The sermon is thick, and those boys still needed a home they could run.
Pass it on
The review
I went in ready to dodge a sermon, and some of it is one. Spencer Tracy plays Father Flanagan, who builds a home for boys who have been thrown out. Mickey Rooney is a boy who does not want the place. They are supposed to govern themselves. That is the work, not a glow around a priest. It is based on a real home.
A house can watch it. I would put it on and tell the kids it is a touch sanctimonious, so they don't swallow the shine. The boys are not props. If we only clap for the famous father, we miss the town those boys are meant to run.
Worth an evening. The check is not the prize. A house, and the man the son is going to be, are.
Pass it on
The review
A father dies and the insurance money arrives in an apartment that is too small for the people in it. The son wants to invest in a liquor store and become someone the check can make him. The mother wants a house. The sister wants a school. The daughter-in-law wants the marriage to survive the son's idea of himself. A man from the neighborhood they are moving into offers to pay them not to come. The offer is the country's sentence, and the film does not blur the man's politeness into innocence.
This is one of the few pictures of the decade I would clear a weeknight for without a hedge. Watch it as a family argument before you watch it as a document. Ask what the son thought the money was for, and what his mother knew it was for. The answers are a stature and a house. The film is on the side of the house, and it is right. Older children can sit through it. The yelling is the sound of people who are not done with each other.
