1930 – 1931 – Jackie Cooper
Skippy
OK, I’m going to apologize to all the Skippy fans out there, but this review is going to be a bit brutal. This was one of those movies that baffles me. Why did people like it enough for it to me nominated for Best Picture? It was a terrible movie, and subsequently, the acting was beyond terrible. That being said, Jackie Cooper was the best of the bunch, which isn’t saying much. But the script was just bad. It’s just hard to find many redeemable qualities in this piece of mind-numbing shlock.
The problem is that I was never a fan of The Little Rascals, and that’s all this movie was. The Little Rascals, or Our Gang, were TV shorts that capitalized on what I sometimes call the cardinal sin of movie making. Cute for the sake of cute is never cute… never. Kids being cute does not a good movie make. But you see, I know Cooper could act. He could act very well. Just watch him in the movie The Champ, which came out the very next year. He was very good in that film because he was given a good script to work with.
Cooper’s performance felt forced, like he was trying too hard to be… well, cute. And I’m guessing he only did that because that’s how the director wanted him to act. The director wanted him to draw the same audience that The Little Rascals did, and it must have worked. He was playing the living embodiment of a newspaper comic strip character. Skippy was a liar, a bully, and a con artist. But he supposedly had a heart of gold, which somehow made everything ok. His big scene, the one in which, I’m guessing, he earned his acting nomination, was the one in which he breaks into tears and sobbing, all out of concern for his friend, a friend, I might add, he had known for less than forty-two hours. He cries and blubbers his way through a, “You just gotta help him,” prayer. And that scene was good, not the slow speech from a child who can’t pronounce every word he is saying. Isn’t that cute? Skippy can’t pronounce that word because he’s too young! Ugh. Still, Cooper’s acting far outshined every one of his child co-stars. And I suppose he looked exactly like the comic strip character he was supposed to be playing, and that had to count for something.