Millions of Americans in the early 1940s knew exactly what came after a mother’s voice calling “Hen-ry! Henry Aldrich!” on the radio: a cracking adolescent reply of “Coming, Mother!” That exchange opened The Aldrich Family every week, and it made a gangly, well-meaning, permanently-in-trouble teenager one of the most familiar characters in the country. Paramount noticed, and between 1939 and 1944 the studio turned out eleven Henry Aldrich movies. They were modest pictures, most running a little over an hour, but they form one of the more complete small-town comedy series of the studio era, and one of them, Henry Aldrich Haunts a House (1943), still draws curious viewers who want to know what a family-comedy franchise did with a spooky old mansion.
From a Broadway bit part to a radio institution
Henry Aldrich was created by the playwright Clifford Goldsmith. He first appeared as a minor character in Goldsmith’s stage comedy What a Life, which opened on Broadway on April 13, 1938, and ran until July 8, 1939, for 538 performances. Ezra Stone, then about twenty, played Henry on stage.
The character moved quickly to radio. After a run of sketches on The Kate Smith Hour in 1938, The Aldrich Family became its own program in July 1939 and stayed on the air until April 1953, mostly on NBC, with a stretch on CBS from 1944 to 1946. Several actors voiced Henry over the years, Ezra Stone being the original and longest-serving. A television version premiered on NBC in October 1949 and ran until 1953, while the radio show was still going.
The film series sat in the middle of that success. It borrowed the characters and the setting, the fictional town of Centerville, but it was Paramount’s own production line, with its own cast and writers.
The Henry Aldrich movies at a glance
All eleven films were produced and released by Paramount Pictures. Running times below are the ones generally listed in published credits; prints and television versions can differ by a minute or two.
| Year | Title | Director | Henry | Running time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1939 | What a Life | Theodore Reed | Jackie Cooper | 75 min |
| 1941 | Life with Henry | Theodore Reed | Jackie Cooper | 80 min |
| 1941 | Henry Aldrich for President | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 75 min |
| 1942 | Henry and Dizzy | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 71 min |
| 1942 | Henry Aldrich, Editor | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 72 min |
| 1943 | Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 72 min |
| 1943 | Henry Aldrich Swings It | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 64 min |
| 1943 | Henry Aldrich Haunts a House | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 73 min |
| 1944 | Henry Aldrich, Boy Scout | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 66 min |
| 1944 | Henry Aldrich Plays Cupid | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 65 min |
| 1944 | Henry Aldrich’s Little Secret | Hugh Bennett | Jimmy Lydon | 75 min |
The Jackie Cooper films: What a Life and Life with Henry
What a Life, released in October 1939, is the most pedigreed of the lot. Theodore Reed directed and produced it, and the screenplay was adapted from Goldsmith’s play by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the writing team that would soon give Paramount Ninotchka, Ball of Fire and much more. Jackie Cooper, the former child star of The Champ, played Henry. Betty Field played Barbara Pearson, Fred Niblo and Hedda Hopper played Henry’s parents, and Vaughan Glaser played the principal, Mr. Bradley, a role he would keep through the series. The story stays close to the play’s school setting: Henry is wrongly blamed for trouble at school and has to clear his name.
Life with Henry followed in January 1941, again directed and produced by Reed, with a script by Clifford Goldsmith and Don Hartman. Cooper, Niblo and Hopper returned, and Eddie Bracken appeared as Henry’s friend Dizzy Stevens, and the plot sends Henry chasing a prize trip to Alaska via a doomed homemade soap business.
The Jimmy Lydon years
When the series resumed later in 1941 with Henry Aldrich for President, Paramount had recast the lead. Jimmy Lydon, who had played the title role in RKO’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1940), took over and played Henry in the remaining nine films. Charles Smith became the regular Dizzy Stevens, John Litel settled in as Henry’s father, Sam Aldrich, and Olive Blakeney played his mother in most of the Lydon entries. (In Henry Aldrich for President the mother is played by Dorothy Peterson.) Vaughan Glaser’s principal and, in the later entries, Joan Mortimer as Henry’s girlfriend Elise rounded out the stock company.
Sol C. Siegel produced the early Lydon films, followed by Walter MacEwen and Michael Kraike. The screenplays came mostly from a small rotating group of writers, chiefly Val Burton and Muriel Roy Bolton, with Aleen Leslie, Edwin Blum and Agnes Christine Johnston also credited on various entries.
- Henry Aldrich for President (1941): Henry runs for student body president at Centerville High, and the campaign gets complicated.
- Henry and Dizzy (1942): the friendship film of the series. Published plot summaries are scarce, so I will not guess at its details.
- Henry Aldrich, Editor (1942): Henry edits the school paper, juices a warehouse-fire story with hints of arson, and ends up suspected of setting fires himself.
- Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1943): Henry wins a date with a movie star and becomes the most popular boy in town, for a while.
- Henry Aldrich Swings It (1943): at 64 minutes the shortest of the run. Detailed synopses are hard to find in reliable sources.
- Henry Aldrich, Boy Scout (1944): Henry, a Senior Patrol Leader, has to manage a spoiled newcomer to his troop ahead of a camporee, a sabotaged compass, and a rescue on a cliff ledge.
- Henry Aldrich Plays Cupid (1944): Henry tries to marry off his stern principal in the hope that romance will soften Mr. Bradley enough to let him graduate. Diana Lynn co-stars.
- Henry Aldrich’s Little Secret (1944): Henry and Dizzy’s babysitting business leaves them caring for an infant after the baby’s father is wrongly accused of a crime.
Henry Aldrich Haunts a House (1943)
The eighth film, released on November 10, 1943, is the one most people search for today, and it is a genuinely odd fit for the series: a family comedy that wanders into the old-dark-house genre.
Credits
| Role | Credit |
|---|---|
| Director | Hugh Bennett |
| Producer | Michael Kraike |
| Screenplay | Muriel Roy Bolton and Val Burton |
| Cinematography | Daniel L. Fapp |
| Editing | Everett Douglas |
| Music | Gerard Carbonara |
| Studio | Paramount Pictures |
| Running time | 73 minutes |
The cast lists Jimmy Lydon as Henry, Charles Smith as Dizzy, John Litel and Olive Blakeney as Sam and Alice Aldrich, Joan Mortimer as Elise Towers, Vaughan Glaser as Mr. Bradley, Jackie Moran as the bully Whit Bidecker, Lucien Littlefield as Mr. Quid and Ray Walker as Detective Beamish. Gail Russell was originally announced for Elise, but Paramount moved her to The Uninvited, its own serious ghost story from the same period, and Joan Mortimer took the part.
The story, without the ending
Published synopses agree on the core. Henry refuses to fight Whit Bidecker and gets branded a coward. To prove himself, he takes a large dose of a tonic that supposedly gives the strength of several men, and it knocks him out in the vicinity of a local house with a haunted reputation. Mr. Bradley, the principal, is in that house the same night, and by the next day he has vanished. Henry’s father gets involved in the investigation, and Henry, Dizzy and Elise end up stumbling around the mansion in the dark, with a trapdoor, a secret basement and a mummy that seems less than fully dead. Sources differ slightly on how the opening is framed, so treat the finer details with care.
The film leans on mistaken identity and slapstick in the dark, and at least one modern reviewer has singled out a pair of mirror gags, including one played out in suits of armor, as the highlights. The same writer found the house surprisingly creepy for a series comedy, though the solution to the mystery is the kind that genre fans will see coming.
Why it stands out
1943 was a busy year for wartime haunted-house comedies, a strand that runs from Bob Hope’s The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), both Paramount releases, through Abbott and Costello at Universal. Henry Aldrich Haunts a House drops a teenage hero into that formula without changing his personality, which is the fun of it.
How the series ended, and what survives
The film series stopped after Henry Aldrich’s Little Secret in 1944. I have found no report that any of the eleven films is lost. Like most of Paramount’s sound features from before 1950, the series appears to have passed to MCA in the 1958 sale of that library for television, which is why the rights now sit with Universal rather than Paramount. I could not find a source that names the Aldrich titles in that package specifically, so take the chain of ownership as likely rather than certain.
If you are new to these films, start with What a Life for the Wilder and Brackett dialogue, then jump to Henry Aldrich Haunts a House to see how comfortably Lydon’s version of the character slots into a genre picture. For the wider studio context that made a series like this possible, my overview of the Golden Age of Hollywood explains how B units kept the theaters supplied, and the character actors of classic Hollywood piece covers the kind of supporting players, like Vaughan Glaser and Lucien Littlefield, who kept these programmers running.
Where to go next
For more studio-era comedy, read about screwball comedy, or browse the full Golden Age Hollywood section.
