DIVORCE IN THE FAMILY (1932)

A vehicle for the popular 1930's child star Jackie Cooper; this is my first Cooper movie and maybe my last. The 10-year-old is not bad but he is a bit whiny and his crying scenes, which must have seemed effective to audiences of the time, don't wear so well. The movie is a kind of forerunner of the after-school specials of the 70's. We first see Cooper and his quite handsome older brother (Maurice Murphy) spending a summer vacation in the field with their father (Lewis Stone), an archeologist. When the boys go back to their mother, they meet their new stepfather (Conrad Nagel), a rather stuffy doctor who has no experience with children. Nagel tries hard to be a good father figure, but he is much stricter than Stone and soon Cooper starts to rebel by being a pest to everyone and constantly getting in trouble. Stone, apparently legally restrained from visiting his children except for the summer month when he has custody, arranges a secret meeting with Cooper in an attempt to get the boy to settle down, but Cooper winds up running away one evening and drifting down a river; Murphy, against Nagel's orders, goes out to find him and is critically injured when his canoe hits a barge. Nagel saves his life and Stone, who was about to kidnap Cooper, realizes that the stepfather is a good egg after all. An even-handed, if hollow, attempt to deal with the issue of divorce; no one is made out to be a villain and everyone winds up accepting the inevitable changes. The mother (Lois Wilson) is an oddly passive figure due to a combination of weak writing and ho-hum acting--she's the only character whom I feel has little at stake in the situation. Some web site reviewers of the film claim that Stone is too permissive and that Cooper realizes at the end that he needs Nagel's discipline, but I have no idea where they get that from. It is a little strange that, compared with Nagel, the much older Stone comes off more like a grandfather than a father. Louise Beavers is the maid and Jean Parker is a love interest for the older boy. [TCM]