Mickey Rooney was on a career roller coaster at the time he appeared in the Columbia Pictures service musical Sound Off (1952). After being released from his contact with MGM in 1948, Rooney found himself in a wide variety of films at several different studios. He quickly went from playing Lorenz Hart in the glossy MGM musical Words and Music (1948) to appearing in low-budget crime melodramas like The Big Wheel (1949) and Quicksand (1950). While the latter films are now recognized as better-than-average entries in the Film Noir cycle, at the time they represented quite a comedown for the one-time Top Box-Office Star. Rooney's friends in the industry kept an eye out for properties that the newly-freelance actor would be right for, and he even returned to MGM for The Strip (1951), another Noir-tinged drama, this time set in the world of jazz musicians. In 1952 Rooney found himself at Columbia Pictures, and briefly enjoyed the company of a creative team that shaped projects to the now-older Rooney's particular talents.

Richard Quine, Rooney's old friend, roommate, and fellow former MGM contractee, had just recently established himself as a director at Columbia. Quine worked on low-budget musicals for the studio; his first two features as solo director were Sunny Side of the Street (1951) starring current chart-topper Frankie Laine, and Purple Heart Diary (1951), a showcase for 1940s favorite Francis Langford. His next assignment was to work with Rooney, who had just been signed to a three-picture deal at Columbia for $75,000 a film. As Rooney wrote in his autobiography, Life Is Too Short, "...it wasn't the money that attracted me. It was the presence at Columbia of Dick Quine, who was being given one of his first chances to direct. And he was going to direct me, his old buddy."

Aside from his work on a pair of unlikely Westerns starring Rod Cameron for Allied Artists, Sound Off was the first important screenplay assignment for another former actor: Blake Edwards, the future writer/director of such films as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), 10 (1979), and Victor Victoria (1982). Edwards co-wrote the script for Sound Off with Quine; the two would continue as partners on several films at Columbia.

The Edwards and Quine script for Sound Off quickly establishes that Los Angeles nightclub entertainer Mike Donnelly (Rooney) is an irrepressible (and sometimes obnoxious) force to be reckoned with. Donnelly has a popular stage show at Ciro's, which he is constantly seeking to improve, especially if he can turn the spotlight away from the supporting cast and back onto himself. He and his manager Joey Kirby (Sammy White) meet up with some girls at a local restaurant, and Donnelly makes a scene by trying out a new bit by dumping a salad on innocent patron Sgt. Crockett (Gordon Jones). Columnist Barney Fisher (Arthur Space) was present at the unseemly display and writes up "Mighty Mouse" in his column the next day. Donnelly explodes, but has little time to vent because Joey shows him an induction notice from the Army. In a moment of self-recognition, Donnelly ponders how he will fit in and asks, "How are they gonna take me?" At Boot Camp, Sgt. Crockett predictably appears as the drill instructor, and Donnelly quickly discovers a pretty nurse (Anne James) to occupy his attentions.

Mickey Rooney must have felt at home with several elements of the plot of Sound Off; in the first few years of his freelance career after leaving MGM, he had worked up a successful nightclub act which he performed in many high-profile clubs as well as on the Las Vegas strip. One also gets the feeling that Rooney willfully put his own perfectionist (and sometimes abrasive) personality into the Donnelly character. The fictional character could swing wildly from obnoxious to appealing; after striking out with several bad jokes during his induction exams, Donnelly eventually ingratiates himself with his fellow inductees by breaking into impromptu musical interludes. One of the sprightliest songs on the soundtrack, "Blow Your Own Horn," is a Mickey Rooney original.

The title Sound Off originated with a popular tune of the day. The tune began as a genuine military cadence or marching chant, credited to a Private Willie Duckworth and written while the soldier was in training at Fort Slocum in New York during WWII. "Duckworth's Chant" was issued as a V-Disc to servicemen around the world in 1944, so it became widely recognized in the closing months of the war. "Sound Off," as it was more widely known after the war, began to be heard on radio and film (most memorably in the MGM war picture Battleground [1949]) and was covered by several popular bands. Probably the biggest-selling recording was by Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra on a 1951 release on RCA Victor Records; this record would have been fresh in the public's mind when the Columbia film was released just the following year. Columbia played up the musical appeal of Sound Off over the service comedy angle. The posters showed a tuxedo-clad Rooney wooing a chorus girl in a dance pose, with a tagline calling it "A musical maneuver in SuperCineColor."

The other two films produced under Rooney's contract with Columbia, and created by the Quine and Edwards team, were All Ashore (1953), another service comedy-musical, followed by a change-of-pace, Drive a Crooked Road (1954), a fine crime thriller. The Rooney-Quine-Edwards team worked together again on a TV series, a sitcom called The Mickey Rooney Show (aka Hey Mulligan 1954-1955), which aired for one season (33 episodes) on NBC. A few years later Rooney turned in a memorable supporting role in yet another Quine-Edwards service comedy for Columbia, the rollicking Operation Mad Ball (1957), which starred Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs.

Producer: Jonie Taps
Director: Richard Quine
Screenplay: Blake Edwards, Richard Quine
Cinematography: Ellis W. Carter
Art Direction: Carl Anderson
Film Editing: Charles Nelson
Cast: Mickey Rooney (Mike Donnelly), Anne James (Lt. Coleen Rafferty), Sammy White (Joey Kirby), John Archer (Maj. Paul Whiteside), Gordon Jones (Sgt. Crockett), Wally Cassell (Tony Baccigalupi)
C-83m.

By John M. Miller