Tonight being Christmas Eve I spent the night watching a randomly selected movie that had nothing to do with Christmas. It's a 1952 sports/gambling movie called Boots Malone. William Holden plays a manager at a racetrack who takes a teenage runaway under his wing and trains him to be a jockey. Despite having Holden and some other interesting actors (Ed Begley, Harry Morgan) it didn't really work for me. But there are a couple of interesting aspects.
For one, give director William Dieterle credit. The jockeys in the movie look pretty much the way jockeys in real life do. Which means that Holden spends a good amount of time talking to guys who barely come up to his chest.
The kid is played by Johnny Stewart, who was only an actor for a few years. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, irritating. But the way he's irritating is revealing. At this point teenagers could be depicted as large children whose emotional tumult was pretty innocuous from an adult point of view. But it was 1952. That conceit wouldn't last much longer.
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We spent Christmas Eve in pretty much the same way, Christmas Night too, except in our case we've been watching more episodes of Endeavour - a show that's largely specialized in bumping off young attractive women. They've also managed to get rid of a number of Oxford dons. I'm not sure what to make of that.
The William Holden movie sounds as if it had an interesting premise even if it didn't match up to expectations. Not all of them do as we can attest. You're right that teenagers in the 50s were usually portrayed as large children under imaginary pressures. I'm not sure that was always the case in real life but it is a fact that tv and the movies often preferred to leave real drama to the adults.
Speaking of teenage children in the 50s, our old friend Geraldine sent us this video of Sugar Chile Robinson who was famous for a time as a jazz pianist. He started playing piano on his own when he was two and by the time he was fourteen he asked his father if he could stop performing in order to return to school. He became a psychologist. Pretty cool, eh?
From what you and Jerry tell me Endeavour sounds like one of those shows that if I catch it would be better to watch the early seasons (or series as they say over there.) Maybe one of these days. Strange about the Oxford dons. Maybe it's intercollegiate rivalry and the show's writers are Cambridge men.
Boots Malone was from William Dieterle, who also directed Portrait of Jennie. "Weird and not for everyone" seems to have been his metier, and I think with Jennie I was more on the right side of "everyone." It's odd, because 18-year-olds had gone to war in mass numbers, probably with a few younger kids slipping in as well. For some reason they were more comfortable treating this character as a child, but the effect was odd.
That was a very entertaining and feel-good clip of Sugar Child Robinson. He's still with us and even started making music again a few years back. Seems to have lived a pretty extraordinary life.
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