Astonishingly enough, Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1946) featured the first real mention of World War II in any Andy Hardy picture. It had been two and a half years since the previous entry, Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944), and in the interim, star Mickey Rooney had served in the U.S. Army. Every moviegoer knew this, and since every moviegoer had also basically watched Rooney grow up on screen, it made sense to have his character of Andy Hardy serve in the Army, too. The film begins with Andy returning home to Carvel, Idaho, after the war -- and going back to Wainwright College to finish his freshman year!

The war, then, is treated as a little blip, after which everything gets back to the usual formula of Andy Hardy's juvenile anguish and romantic shenanigans peppered with grave father-son talks.

MGM probably assumed that keeping the Hardy world insular and protected from the jittery, atomic, post-WWII real world would allow audiences a measure of reassuring nostalgia. But it had the stronger effect of making the film and characters seem anachronistic and dated. As The New York Times' Bosley Crowther wrote: "Now that Mickey Rooney is back from the late unpleasantness and has resumed in the series role which won him his chief popularity and fame, it appears that the nature of Andy is no different from what it was before, and that Mr. Rooney has grown a little broader, comically speaking, but he certainly hasn't grown up."

The film made some money, but the public was overall rather apathetic toward this fifteenth entry in the series, and it was clear that the Andy Hardy films had petered out in popularity. MGM returned to the franchise to make a final reunion edition in 1958, Andy Hardy Comes Home, but that fared even worse.

The comic highlight of Love Laughs at Andy Hardy is undoubtedly the frosh dance sequence, during which the five-foot-two-inch Rooney must jitterbug with the six-foot-two-inch Dorothy Ford.

Producer: Robert Sisk
Director: Willis Goldbeck
Screenplay: William Ludwig, Harry Ruskin; Aurania Rouverol (characters); Howard Dimsdale (story)
Cinematography: Robert Planck
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Henry McAfee
Music: David Snell
Film Editing: Irvine Warburton
Cast: Mickey Rooney (Andrew 'Andy' Hardy), Lewis Stone (Judge James K. Hardy), Sara Haden (Aunt Milly Forrest), Bonita Granville (Kay Wilson), Lina Romay (Miss Isobel Gonzales), Fay Holden (Mrs. Emily Hardy), Dorothy Ford (Coffy Smith), Hal Hackett (Duke Johnson), Dick Simmons (Dane Kittridge), Clinton Sundberg (Haberdashery Clerk), Geraldine Wall (Miss Hattie Geeves), Addison Richards (Mr. George Benedict).
BW-92m. Closed Captioning.

by Jeremy Arnold