The Atomic Kid Blu-ray Review
It's a bomb.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 30, 2013
In the immortal words of a certain philosopher named Heidi Klum, "One day you're in, and the next day you're out".
Mickey Rooney, who is rather incredibly still alive as this review is being written, might be forgiven if he feels his "out"
days significantly outnumber his "in" days over the course of his improbably long career. Rooney actually got his start in
silents, but during his apprenticeship at Metro Goldwyn Mayer saw his star rise dramatically until he was the top box
office draw for three years starting in the late thirties and progressing through the early forties. (Wasn't there an old
Saturday Night Live skit about "Rooney" looking back on these years as if they were yesterday?) But just as
quickly as he ascended to the heights, Rooney found himself less and less palatable to the movie going public once he
got a bit older (older in this case meaning merely in his twenties), and after a stint in the armed services during World
War II and a couple of parting shots at mainstream glory (including a final film with his frequent partner Judy Garland),
Rooney struggled to maintain any degree of relevance in the wild and wooly world of show business. Like any good
pro, he never
admitted he was "out", and in fact kept working regularly, albeit usually on less than A-list
projects. Looking over Rooney's
oeuvre from the 1950s and 1960s, there's a certain degree of pedestrian
sadness about many of his efforts, including at least a couple of failed television series, a highly touted but never
realized "showbiz school" he wanted to found (kind of along the lines of Fred Astaire Dance Studios), and some fairly
lame motion pictures. Rooney's personal and professional lives were deeply intertwined during these years, and
unfortunately tragedy struck several times affecting both facets of the actor's life. His 1964 sitcom was edged into
cancellation by the suicide of costar Sammee Tong (though it probably wouldn't have lasted anyway due to low ratings),
and a couple of years later his fifth wife Carolyn Mitchell was found dead next to her lover in what was ruled a murder-
suicide. The woman who preceded Mitchell as Mrs. Mickey Rooney was one Elaine Devry (billed here as "Elaine Davis –
Mrs. Mickey Rooney"),
and she is the only female
character in the pretty silly 1954 comedy
The Atomic Kid, a Rooney produced effort that has whatever limited
cachet it has due to being the film that one Marty McFly goes to see in
Back to the Future. Based on a story by Blake Edwards (yes, Blake
Edwards),
The Atomic Kid has little to recommend it other than the window it affords into Rooney's perhaps
desperate attempt to keep working, no matter how ridiculous the project.
One might think that nuclear holocaust might not be the best subject for a goofy, almost childlike, comedy, and in the
case
of
The Atomic Kid, one would be more or less correct, despite some sporadic laughs scattered through this
enterprise. Mickey plays lackluster sad sack Blix (does anyone have names like that outside of the movies?), who has
been cajoled into looking for uranium by his avaricious best buddy Stan (Robert Strauss in one of his few starring roles).
Of course Blix and Stan wander into a Nevada test site where a nuclear bomb is about to go off. Stan manages to
avoid
the carnage, but Blix, who has found a supply of peanut butter in a test house (full of mannequins), has stayed behind
to
get some much needed nourishment. Against all odds, Blix actually ends up surviving the test blast and immediately
becomes both a media sensation as well as a highly interesting subject for both the FBI and some nasty Commie spies.
Though it's unclear how much Blake Edwards' story actually fleshed out the screenplay, there are some relatively
Edwards-esque sight gags throughout the film. There are some good moments early on when Blix and Stan get into
the test house, thinking they've stumbled across a sign of civilization after having been lost in the desert for days, only
to completely freak out when they stumble across the mannequins. Earlier, Blix has been complaining of starvation and
how all he really needs is a ham sandwich, stumbling off into the desert as Stan, who's behind him, of course pulls a
ham sandwich out of his backpack and takes a gigantic bite. There's a nice gag worthy of Buster Keaton when Blix is
found right after the blast, but that then devolves into the sort of low rent silliness that repeatedly hobbles this film,
when it turns out Blix's "neutrons" have supposedly sped up, resulting in him sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk when he
talks. Later, he's subjected to all sorts of tests at a hospital facility and soon falls head over heels in love with his
nurse, Audrey (Elaine Davis).
Playing out against all of this is Stan's machinations to trade in on Blix's sudden celebrity, as well as various
governmental agencies (both domestic and foreign) trying to get their hands on Blix to figure out how he survived the
nuclear blast. A lot of this film plays like a Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello enterprise. Early on, when Stan
takes a bite of his hidden sandwich, one could easily see Oliver Hardy doing
exactly the same thing. And in the
test house, Stan's slow burn after he gets whacked a couple of times by a blundering Blix could have come out of any
Laurel and Hardy enterprise. Stan's scheming is more in line with the typical "big plans" that Bud Abbott used to bring
to any given Abbott and Costello enterprise, while Blix's innocent naïvete is a near perfect stand in for the wide eyed
childlike sensibility of Lou Costello.
Unfortunately the screenplay can't sustain these parallels for very long, and most of
The Atomic Kid is as flat as
a test house after a nuclear explosion. Rooney mugs more and more incessantly as the film goes on, probably only too
aware that not much else was going to generate substantial laughs. The film's "logic" (a decidedly relative term) is also
all over the place, with Blix's "special powers" granted courtesy of the explosion veering from lighting up when he's
kissed to repeatedly being able to hit slot machine jackpots on a quick trip to Vegas with Audrey.
Blix may have
hit the jackpot, but
The Atomic Kid is a bust pretty much the whole way.
