1930s Divorce Films and the Child Actor
Child of Divorce (1932), Tomorrow's Youth (1934), and Wednesday's Child (1934)
As with adults, there is a difference between a child star and a child actor. The aim of the child actor is to appear as an actual child. The aim of the child star is to appear as him or herself, generally with an audience-tested repertoire of facial and verbal expressions, gimmicks that appeal to an audience’s sense, not of what children actually are, but of what they are imagined to be in movies. This appeal, which is often identified with cuteness, turns out to be surprisingly time-bound rather than timeless. One decade’s adorable tyke seems another’s mutant. And this is moving forward in time; one can only imagine what response earlier generations might have to today’s child stars.
Justin Henry was eight years old when he played the role of the son in 1979’s divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer. Cute thought he could be, Henry’s restrained performance was very much that of the child actor. He received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and 43 years later still holds the record for youngest performer to be nominated in that category.
The length of that record is far outstripped, though, by Jackie Cooper, who at the age of nine became (and still is) the youngest actor ever nominated for best actor in a leading role, for his performance in the 1931 comedy Skippy. But Cooper was more child star than child actor, as can be seen from his performance the following year in Divorce in the Family.
In this 1932 divorce drama, Cooper plays the son of divorced parents. The parents treat each other amicably, though for some unexplained reason the father, a globetrotting ethnologist, is under a court order that prevents him from approaching his two sons except during the one month out of the year when he has custody. Cooper still hopes his parents will get back together, hopes that are dashed when his mother gets remarried to the family doctor, a well-meaning but rigid sort who, out of insecurity, unwisely tries to discipline Cooper into filial affection.
I haven’t seen Cooper’s better known films of that time—i.e., The Champ (1931), Treasure Island (1934)—but find his shtick in Divorce in the Family less endearing than audiences evidently did. Little Cooper looks like a miniaturized old man, with a perpetual scowl and pout, and seems like he should be chomping on a cigar. (As he eventually did in the years of my own childhood when he played Daily Planet editor Perry White in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies.)
Granted, Cooper doesn’t have much to work with in the mediocre Divorce in the Family. Though the movie revolves around his resentment of his stepfather and desire to stay with his actual father, he is mostly called on to say “hot diggity” a lot, frighten the black maid with frogs, and run away from home with an actual stick-and-kerchief and dog named “Sparky” in tow. What a scamp.
Divorce in the Family resolves its conflict with a medical emergency in which Cooper’s older brother punctures a lung and is saved through the efforts of the stepfather doctor. In the process, stepdad realizes that he has attempted to force the boys’ affection rather than kindling it with his own, and with this new awareness can promise their real father that “I love these boys as my own.”
Real dad, meanwhile, makes peace with the fact that he is more suited to fieldwork than fathering, especially seeing that his boys are now well cared for. Cooper tells him cheerfully, before dad takes off on his next research expedition: “You know, having two fathers ain’t so bad at that.”
If Cooper isn’t allowed much of a script here, Tomorrow’s Youth (1934) is even more of a trite vehicle. The child star in this case is Dickie Moore, just shy of nine years old when he made this divorce comedy. (I assume there is a nod to the name in the David Spade comedy Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star.)
The film opens in New York City, where Moore’s father is having an affair with a Blonde Gold Digger(TM). When the mother finds out she takes Moore with her back to her hometown in Indiana. The family lawyer dissuades her from obtaining a divorce—lest there be scandal—but writes up a separation agreement that gives each parent custody for half the year.
Mom is sweet and the six months with her are happy. When Dad’s time comes, though, we are introduced to two problems. First is that dad puts Moore is under the charge of a strict and humorless tutor—character actor Franklin Pangborn who plays his usual effeminate and fussy gay stereotype. (Moore dubs him “the Big Sissy.”) Second is that Blonde Gold Digger is determined to provoke mom into suing for divorce so she can marry dad, or dad’s money.
In all of this, Moore’s job is to look adorable and speak innocently comic truths, which he does, quite as if the baby from a Gerber label had come to life. He is given some Little Rascals moments of hi-jinx, including games with a black playmate named “Snowball” (who I notice is absent from the scene in which Moore invites all the kids back to swim in dad’s pool).
This movie resolves with a courtroom scene in which the kindly judge tells Moore, placed on the stand, to act as judge in his own custody case. Wouldn’t you know it, but his proposal that his parents get back together is so endearing and common sensical that they agree to drop the divorce case and reunite. Nothing is mentioned about the father’s infidelity or girlfriend, but everyone is smiling. Cute kid!
Quite a different sort of movie—and performance—is Wednesday’s Child (1934), starring the 13 year old Frankie Thomas. In this movie, Dad is a genial, chortling, fat man type, mismatched with the serious, sensual mom who has fallen in love with another man. In the subsequent divorce settlement, the court awards dad custody in the summers and mom the rest of the year.
Thomas adores his father—who is a bit of a kid himself—and resents and blames his mother. He counts the days until summer comes and he can be with his dad again but, when summer arrives, discovers that dad now has a fiancée who is determined to commandeer the lion’s share of dad’s attention and take him away on a honeymoon during the summer he is supposed to be spending with his son.
Emotionally crushed, Thomas faints, and the doctor who tends him back to health tells the parents that their son’s health is being injured by his lack of permanence. “I’d like to suggest that he remain permanently with one of you for the next few years,” says the doctor, and when he sees that neither parent is willing to give up custody, suggests as a Plan B that “military school might do the trick.”
Thomas is actor, not star. He had the demanding lead (the longest Broadway role for a child actor at that time) in the play on which the movie is based. (The play was adapted for film a second time in the 1946 as Child of Divorce). When Thomas was cast in the film he moved to Hollywood with his parents, each of whom has a small part in the film—his real-life father as one of the divorce lawyers, and his real-life mother as the attending nurse following the fainting scene.
The center of this film is Thomas’s face—its anguished register of his mother’s infidelity, his parents’ divorce, his mother’s remarriage, his father’s weakness. While he is supposed to be playing a 10 year old, there is no cuteness here, but brooding unhappiness and yearning for a shattered home.
Evidently, the play ends on a grim note, with the son at military academy learning the hard lesson that he has to forego relying on his parents for emotional support. We get that too near the end of the film, as Thomas’s roommate at the military school, also a child of divorce, counsels him to forget about his parents and take care of himself. “We don’t need ‘em,” he says of parents who divorce and carry on their lives with new partners.
But the Hollywood film can’t leave things there, and has mom and dad overhear this conversation. Mom is remorseful: “I’ve spoiled all our lives,” she frets. “He’ll never be happy again with either of us.” Dad then takes up the challenge, and decides that he will throw aside his fiancée and devote himself exclusively to his son.
“You see, Bobby,” he tells Thomas. “I’m not going to be married after all.”
Thomas breaks out in a huge grin. “Gee, Dad!”
“From now on we’re going to keep bachelor quarters.”
Bobby has some hesitation—as we all might—about whether this is really the happy ending it’s being billed as, but dad assures him: “I’ll be all right.”
It’s a rather question-begging conclusion, but it’s out of Thomas’s (and the playwright’s) hands. Perhaps it would have been a better fit for Jackie Cooper or Dickie Moore.