Skippy (1931)

OK, so I haven't had a chance to watch that longest Best Picture winner just yet. I had to settle for a much shorter film this time out, so I decided to go with another winner from 1932, the same year as my previous entry, Cimarron. Skippy was that year's winner for Best Director (Norman Taurog), and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (for the film's young star Jackie Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Skippy is a precocious rich kid, the son of a doctor during the Great Depression, who likes to spend his time in Shantytown, despite his father's wishes. Skippy's father, for the sake of public health and safety, is directing the city Board of Health to evict the residents of Shantytown. Skippy, for the most part, gets along better with the residents of Shantytown than he does with his own schoolmates from the right side of the tracks. A run-in with a Shantytown bully and his dog-catcher father leads to Skippy's new friend's dog being taken to the pound, and the boys have to scramble to get the fee before the dog is put down.

The film is carried on the shoulders of 9-year-old star Jackie Cooper, still the youngest actor to ever be nominated for a lead Actor/Actress Oscar. Most of the rest of the characters are the kids that Skippy hangs out with, so most of the cast are also child actors. This leads to an interesting contrast with Cimarron. The child actors were too young to have learned acting habits for silent films and stage that don't really work for movies with sound, so the acting across the board is more natural than in Cimarron. However, being children, they had not really had time to master their craft, so, other than the natural talent and appeal of Cooper, the acting in the film still cannot be said to be particularly good. In this film, however, if the actors are too loud at times, it is because of the child's tendency to say things louder when they are important, rather than over-enunciation due to and outdated acting style.

Skippy was based on a popular comic strip of the time, so its story is every bit as slight as Cimarron's was overwrought. It has remarkable insight into the mind and activities of a child - all the more remarkable considering the fact that it was directed by a man with the cruelty to tell his young star (and nephew) that his dog was going to be shot in order to make him cry for a scene. Beyond that, however, the story doesn't have much substance - a few gags as the kids go about their daily lives (none of which, apparently, involves going to school), a couple of manipulative tearjerker scenes, and an ending that is completely implausible. In short, the film is cute, but dated, and it has very little to recommend other than Jackie Cooper's performance.