Sometimes families can be disrupted when a young person has ideas that don’t match the family’s values. One film shows how books can affect a young person’s views on life, and not always in positive ways. “Ah, Wilderness!” (1935) was a very successful MGM film based on Eugene O’Neill’s play of the same name, his only comedy. The film features a star-studded cast, and, while this story is funny at times, it deals with serious subjects that a small-town family faces.
In 1906, Richard Miller (Eric Linden) is about to graduate from high school in a small New England town. He has a lot of radical ideas from reading controversial books, and he shares them with his sweetheart, Muriel McComber (Cecilia Parker). Richard’s father (Lionel Barrymore), a newspaperman, tries to keep an open mind about his son’s new ideas, but he worries that they will get him into trouble.
Other members of the family include the caring mother (Spring Byington), her prudish spinster sister, Lily (Aline MacMahon), drunken Uncle Sid (Wallace Beery), Richard’s college-aged brother, Arthur (Frank Albertson), younger brother Tommy (Mickey Rooney), and mischievous sister Mildred (Bonita Granville).
Before Andy Hardy
If you’re an old movie fan, you doubtless are familiar with the Andy Hardy film series, a collection of 16 films released between 1937 and 1958, which are title character Mickey Rooney’s biggest claim to fame. Before the Hardy family rode high and before love found Andy Hardy, there was “Ah, Wilderness!”At first glance, the only similarity this 1935 coming-of-age tale bears to the Hardy films is the presence of Mickey Rooney and Cecilia Parker, the Hardy children, who don’t even play siblings in this film. Nevertheless, the success of this Clarence Brown-directed film led to the creation of the Hardy Family film series two years later.
The box office success of “Ah, Wilderness!” inspired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to reunite most of the cast for another story about average American family life, this time with a modern setting. The result was the 1937 hit “A Family Affair,” which was based on Aurania Rouverol’s 1928 play “Skidding.” Now as the Hardy family, Lionel Barrymore reprised his role as the father with Spring Byington as his wife and Mickey Rooney as their son. This time, Cecilia Parker was their daughter, with Eric Linden playing her sweetheart. Aline MacMahon was replaced by Sara Haden as the maiden aunt, Milly instead of Lily. Instead of an older brother and younger daughter, the only other child in the family was an older daughter, played by Julie Haydon.
After “A Family Affair” proved popular enough to inspire further installments, big stars Barrymore and Byington were replaced by lesser performers Lewis Stone and Fay Holden as the Hardy parents. The older daughter was written out of the story, and Wayne Trent was played by a minor actor the one time the character appeared onscreen in a later film. While Marion (Parker) was more prominent in the early films, Andy quickly became equally important, eventually becoming the star of the series.
“Ah, Wilderness!” is entertaining, wholesome, and meaningful. It has a fantastic cast, featuring two of the most famous middle-aged actors of the 1930s (Barrymore and Byington) as well as several young rising stars. The story is a fun family outing, perfect for summertime. Without being overly serious or heavy-handed, it is a cautionary tale about the importance of supervising one’s children. As Richard’s case shows, books can be just as radicalizing as entertainment and social media.
