A film about family and upbringing The famous American inventor Thomas Alva Edison died in 1931. In 1940, perhaps the decade since his death, MGM released two feature biopics: Young Tom Edison and Edison the Man. The second film in our box office was more fortunate, it briefly appeared on our screens in the first postwar period. The author of these lines saw him in 1945 in the Moscow cinema "Artistic". A film about young Edison never appeared. Nowadays, it can be purchased on disk with Spanish subtitles and even make your own Russian translation.
There is something in common between these two films: they are illustrations to the legend and it is not worth studying the biography of the real Thomas Edison. In the film about young Edison we see a family with three children - the elder Bill, middle Tom and his younger sister Tanny. The real Tom Edison was the youngest of seven children, although only four reached adulthood. Anne's sister, Tanny, was fourteen years older than Tom. In the film, the whole family plays and sings the ballad "Oh Genevieve", although this work appeared only in 1869, when the real Tom Edison had long left his father's home and lived an independent life.
But all these differences are not essential for the perception of the picture, since its main theme is the problem of raising a difficult teenager in the atmosphere of a small provincial town, even, rather, a village. There is a school where children of different ages are gathered in one class. Technical progress exists in the form of a railway station and a telegraph junction near it, where young Tom is irresistibly drawn. He has long mastered Morse code and taps clues to his sister in class. The boy has a bad reputation, he is expelled from school for his passion for chemical experiments, the whole town laughs at him and considers him abnormal. The educational impact of the father is reduced to flogging. Only two protect him: his mother and sister Tanny.
It turns out that curiosity, desire for knowledge, initiative and enterprise are very dangerous traits of character. They lift Tom to the heights of fame and popularity, then throw him into the abyss of despair. These swings are facilitated by the so-called public - Tom is condescendingly praised for success, but with much greater enthusiasm, kicks and cracks are brought down on him when failures. Only the mother unconditionally believes in him, she convinces her son that this town is not the whole world, and you need to patiently wait for the time when there will be an opportunity to escape from here. And that moment comes: Tom accomplishes a real feat, the fame of him spreads throughout the district, the father is now proud of his son, and the telegraph company is ready to hire him at the central office.
Technically, the film was made very well, the atmosphere of the town of those years and all its characters are discharged with good acting skills. Especially, of course, should be noted Mickey Rooney in the lead role. Energetic and independent teenagers are clearly his element, because he had already played by that time Huckleberry Finn in the adaptation of the famous novel by Mark Twain. It is funny that in our country he is known in a completely different role. Stanley Kramer in his film “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” gave him the role of a slut who, in the company of the same friend, was in the cockpit of an uncontrolled aircraft.
