Boys Town (MGM, 1938)

Mark Dischinger

Disgusted with a prison system that churns out career criminals instead of rehabilitating decent boys who made a wrong turn, Father Eddie Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) adopts five boys with the novel idea that providing them with a surrogate family – Father Flanagan and each other -- will keep them from adopting a life of crime. Within a year, Flanagan has fifty boys under his roof, and in a few more years (and a minute of montage) has built Boys Town, a 200-acre community of several hundred young men living independently with their own elected government, machine and wood shops, post office, barber shop and farm. Flanagan’s utopia faces crisis when, at the request of a murderer sentenced to life, he agrees to house Whitey Marsh (Mickey Rooney), whose rejection of the town’s laws and assumed criminal acts threaten to shatter fragile public support and close Boys Town.

From a present-day standpoint, I was interested in the frank acknowledgement of crime – an eleven year-old convicted of murder for shooting his mother’s abusive boyfriend, for example – that seemed to insert the unpleasantries of an America that existed outside the theater. From the opening scene the movie makes a concerted effort to humanize the incarcerated, never overstepping the code but still asserting that criminal tendencies are the product of environment. This was Flanagan’s theory, and it – and its opposition to popular antipathy for nurture over nature -- also forms the basis for the fourth season of The Wire. Things don’t change, from 21^st century Baltimore to the mean streets of Omaha (that’s right) in 1938. It had to be Omaha, though, because that’s where the real Father Flanagan opened the real Boys Town (which still exists) – Boys Town the film is a star-driven social problem biopic.

While Tracy’s unblinking (and Oscar-winning) performance is easy to watch, Boys Town’s piercing sentimentality is dulled by Mickey Rooney, whose hamminess echoes Looney Tunes gangsters and presages Sally Field’s Oscar acceptance speech. If you aren’t a fan, one of the true joys of Boys Town is watching Mickey Rooney finally get beaten senseless in a boxing match. Structurally, the movie is a clear shared-star vehicle: the first third is all Tracy as he builds Boys Town; Rooney arrives a half-hour in, and the next third follows his inability to drop his tough-guy act – no audience member or character within the film believes it -- and adapt to the socialist utopia; the final third unites the storylines of Flanagan’s fight for Boys Town with Whitey’s misguided love for his criminal brother.

The media machine of 1938, as depicted in Boys Town, would prefer to report punishment over rehabilitation, and banks would love to foreclose on Flanagan’s idealistic enterprise, since they only care about money. Whitey catalyzes these external threats, but the necessity of public opinion – and the ease by which it’s controlled – is another bit in Boys Town that keeps it from becoming too dated. The elephant in the room, of course, is that a priest whose belief that “there’s no such thing as a bad boy” takes a different connotation for today’s audience. The syrupy earnestness of Boys Town, though, makes you wish you didn’t think that way.