THE ATOMIC KID (1954)
Tagline: It's a Laugh Explosion!
(Comedy, Sci-Fi, Radiation) [G]
Note – This movie wasn’t given an MPAA rating, but if it was it would get a G.
I always pictured my dream man as being tall, dark, and handsome. And then you come along; short, redheaded, and radioactive.
In this one Blix and his friend, Stan are hiding out in a house that was set up to show the effects of an atomic bomb. Stan goes to check on something leaving Blix at the house eating peanut butter and gets just out of range of the effects of the bomb. Blix does not, but miraculously survives the blast. While in the hospital dealing with his radioactive properties Blix courts a nurse named Audrey. Meanwhile, Stan uses Blix new found radioactive properties to try and make money while inadvertently helping out the FBI. Can this radioactive romance last? Is Stan in over his head?
First off, I am not a fan of everything Mickey Rooney did, but holy cow, he always puts his all into his performances and his role as “Blix” in this is pretty great. In fact, the entire cast is pretty stellar. Rooney is hard to pin down on what he was best known for because he was in over 344 different productions as an actor and still had a few projects released after he passed away in 2014. One thing that can be said is in most of his movies he was an absolute delight on screen.
I mention Rooney first because this movie is pretty much all on him. We do get a good dose of Elaine Devry as Audrey (Blix’s nurse), and she is solid in this film, but most of that comes in the second half of the film. Devry is mostly known for 1973’s THE BOY WHO CRIED WEREWOLF. She was Mickey Rooney’s fifth wife of 8. Robert Strauss is also good in this as Stan, but his character and pretty much everything in this movie gets less and less funny as it moves along.
Regarding the comedy, this is actually fairly funny at times and definitely has its charm. Having said that the jokes are largely dropped after the first half of the movie and the radioactive gags just seem odd now that we know it’s extremely likely if Blix was that radioactive, everyone around him has 3 headed kids or vomits every 3 minutes from radiation poisoning. If you can set that aside, this film however is actually pretty enjoyable and fun to watch. I will say that this movie never really gets boring, but there are slow parts and some scenes that even in a fairly short movie like this, feel unnecessary.
Overall this is worth a watch more as a comedy than a sci-fi film because even for the 50s, the sci-fi portion of this movie comes across as intelligible and very much like the person that wrote it was just completely going with word salad that sounded somewhat like science. For this movie though, it’s fine. I enjoyed this inviting bit of comedy more than I thought I would, and have to at least give it a 4 out of 7.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF MICKEY ROONEY PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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