Magical comedy about a family of con artists who move into the house of a guileless, lonely old woman (Minnie Dupree), hoping to become her heirs, only to be transformed by her benign influence, and by love. It's a promising premise, but where it really succeeds is in the cast – every role filled by the ideal late-'30s actor, from Janet Gaynor as a flinty daughter discovering her humanity, to Roland Young and Billie Burke as her parents, displaying that old Topper spark – and a wonderful script. It's like little else I've seen from classic Hollywood, fusing the sentimentality of a typical Selznick production with a sense of irreverence and absurdity that's like something from an '80s indie movie. Take the scene where Young is forced to go to work for the first time, cutting short his sightseeing trips of London. "There were so many things I never did," he tells his son, in a perfect parody of mortality clichés, "I never even went to the aquarium." The film is full of these bizarre, underplayed comic moments, which are refreshingly intelligent, while possessing a thoroughly modern sensibility. Coupled to an interesting subtext about the family loving the very idea of its harshness, it makes the film's climactic leap into heartfelt emotion – which builds on short passages of kindness and wisdom at crucial junctures – all the more affecting. Ben Hecht used a similar approach for his 1941 film Angels Over Broadway (which also starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), while the plot presumably inspired the 1945 movie The Cheaters, which also cast Burke in her usual role as a wittering mother, while relocating the story to Christmas. The Young in Heart is a bracingly different kind of Hollywood movie, with a strikingly unusual feel and a superb cast that also includes Paulette Goddard, Henry Stephenson, Richard Carlson (doing a bad Scottish accent), a wobbly penguin and a cute puppy. Best of the bunch are Gaynor, who has some marvellous moments, Dupree and Young – in a perfect performance that requires him to be both loveably corrupt and touchingly repentant, without overegging either. The Fairbanks-Goddard chemistry is also first-rate. The only bit of the movie that doesn't work is a slightly dull, unfunny scene of Young driving the car of the future, courtesy of some dodgy process screen work, but it's only about 40 seconds long. The rest of it is amazing.
Review of The Young in Heart
