Killer McCoy

Boxing sequences are well done everything else zzzz

Trying to give Mickey Rooney a tougher image, MGM casts him in a remake of The Crowd Roars (1938). Sure, it's a little rougher than the films he usually appeared in, but it's still unmistakably Mickey Rooney, just a little more stone faced and wearing boxing gloves. James Dunn gets a good part in this, as his hopeless drunken father. The gambling racket bit felt tacked on, and the romance with Ann Blyth never really flourishes. But Rooney does work hard to entertain and makes the movie his own.