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Wholly successful moving pictures are the consequence of a collaboration too complex for analysis. Nonetheless, if the Motion Picture Academy fails to award Director Capra its prize for his first picture since Lost Horizon, most critics will be justified in surmising that its only excuse will be that he has already won it twice before. Known for his knack of inventing "business," Director Capra was faced with the supreme test in a play that was already as full of business as a beehive. How thoroughly he passed it can best be judged by the fact that his shrewd cinema editing helps more than anything else to achieve the paradox of making Vanderhofs and Sycamores on the screen seem more like flesh and blood than they did on the legitimate stage. Examples: Grandpa's friends taking up a collection to pay his fine in court; Alice Sycamore, asked to hurry downstairs, arriving to meet her prospective parents-in-law via the bannister rail; Penny Sycamore using a kitten as a paper weight.
Boys Town (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In 1917 a young Omaha priest named Father Edward J. Flanagan borrowed $90 to start a unique U. S. institution: Boys Town, Neb., a home for waifs, run according to its founder's belief that there is no such thing as a bad boy. Lately grown acutely conscious of the problems of youth, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer naturally found in Boys Town cinematerial well up to the standard of that supplied by the Russell-Cotes naval training institution in England. The result, in this picture, is a companion piece to Lord Jeff, with Mickey Rooney replacing Freddie Bartholomew as the urchin who eventually conquers a criminal background to become a credit to his school.
Written by John Meehan and Dore Schary, supplied with data from Father Flanagan, who acted as technical advisor, directed by Norman Taurog (Skippy, Tom Sawyer), Boys Town presents its subject with commendable simplicity. As Father Flanagan, Spencer Tracy supplies a grave paternalism well calculated to contrast with Master Rooney's fantastic swagger.
Most impressive scenes in the picture are those, some made on location at Boys Town, showing the working of student government, dormitory shenanigans, methods of handling recalcitrant newcomers.
Equipped, inevitably, with a story in which the hero is torn between loyalty to Boys Town and to his old life, represented by a bank-robbing older brother, the picture focuses principally on Father Flanagan. In real life, Father Flanagan has never been ashamed to publicize his enterprise getting celebrities like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and the late Will Rogers to visit Boys Town, sending the school band out to tour the country. Final sequence in the picture, with characteristic fidelity to fact, leaves Father Flanagan planning to enlarge Boys Town's population to 500 and hoping to get the necessary funds by prayer—to which cinemaddicts may surmise, this picture may well turn out to be the answer.