As Sam Goldwyn famously said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”
Sometimes, though, film can pack quite a punch — Boys Town (1938) is a notable example.
“There are no bad boys,” Fr. Edward J. Flanagan famously said of the vision guiding his life’s work rescuing society’s throwaway boys. While serving as a parish priest in Omaha, Nebraska, working with homeless, he witnessed a prisoner going to his death decrying the system, which seared in his soul a desire for change.
That’s where the film begins.
“My heart was heavy as I thought of all the wreckage of humanity that I had seen come out of the reform schools, the prisons,” he said in a 1941 radio address recalling that “day … (a) boy was about to be hanged for a murder he had committed in a drunken brawl. And just before he died, he looked at me and said, ‘Father, I’m dying for a crime I didn’t commit in my heart, but for a system that makes criminals out of boys, and then hangs them.’ … (I)t was that moment that I realized that we needed to stop reforming boys and start building citizens.”
By the time Dore Schary, MGM Head of Production, got the story, Fr. Flanagan had made model citizens out of 5,000 ruffians over 20 years of work.
Ironically, the two lead actors, Spencer Tracy (“Fr. Flanagan”) and Mickey Rooney (“Whitey Marsh”) — two of Hollywood’s biggest and baddest stars — were tailor-made for the film.
Tracy, whose demons were as big as his stardom, would regularly “fall off the wagon” — drinking to anesthetize hidden wounds. Rooney, a hyperactive skirt chaser and horse bettor, also regularly sought solace in the bottle.
As Spence later confided to Garson Kanin, “‘Every time I play a priest — and I’ve done my share ... every time I put on the clothes and the collar, I feel right, right away ...” Though, he was always initially hesitant, fearing he had missed the calling his father had hand-picked for him. Never mind that he had the soul of an actor.
But, as he pondered the lead in Boys Town, “the doubts melted away when he met the soft-spoken Fr. Flanagan, a dignified Rock of Gibraltar-like figure,” as Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness and Lemmon reveals. “After spending a good bit of time with Fr. Flanagan in Omaha, Tracy wrote, ‘He’s a great man — the greatest man I ever met.’”
Just the tonic his restless spirit needed. He had begun drinking again after winning the Best Actor Oscar for Captains Courageous (1937). “But, soon enough, he climbed right back on the wagon with prodding from the studio, as he readied to make Boys Town,” for which he won another Best Actor Oscar, complementing the film’s Best Original Story Oscar.
Meanwhile Rooney was now playing someone his 18-year-old self could relate to — “a combination of Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and King Kong, with a pack of butts in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other and his mind made up to blow this joint as soon as the padre’s back is turned,” he wrote in Life is Too Short — even as the two actors formed a lifelong bond in which Tracy fathered Rooney whose own father had abandoned him.
The film, made in nine weeks — three weeks on location and six weeks on the MGM soundstage — showed how the discipline Fr. Flanagan instilled in the homeless boys and the activities he afforded them from farming and construction to sports and academics — bonding and camaraderie suffusing the whole experience — helped them rise above their circumstances to pursue healthy and productive lives.
Freedom of religion and worship was a hallmark of Boys Town. As if to underscore the point, Schary gave Flanagan a Jewish friend, a pawnbroker, who was an early benefactor. As Rooney wrote of the visionary ecumenism, “So a Jewish money man was helping a Catholic priest; they were working together on goodness and justice.”
As the story unfolds, Flanagan’s “Boys Home” soon grows to a “Town” and Whitey’s gangster brother asks its founder to take care of his kid brother — his toughest challenge yet. When Whitey’s defiance nearly costs the life of “Pee Wee,” a darling little boy who captures everyone’s hearts, Fr. Flanagan’s “tough love” finally penetrates even hard-boiled Whitey and, by the end, the boys, embodying strength and goodness, march en masse to Whitey’s rescue.
Ironically, the film, grossing $4,133,000 (c. $100 million in 2025 dollars), caused Boys Town donations to plunge, audiences concluding it was flush with cash; and it almost closed — only to be rescued itself.
