...at least not in the sense of you getting your own way. This is the lesson of this installment of the Rusty series in which Danny Mitchell has developed quite a problem of lying. Hugh Mitchell is taking a tough stand with Danny, spanking him and threatening to send him to military school. All this does is instill a sense of fear of rejection in Danny so that he gets deeper and deeper into one particular lie that he told to cover up an initially rather innocent mistake that he made with the lie ultimately causing both a scandal and a tragedy. It takes a blind handy man - unique to this particular Rusty film - to get father and son on the same page again.
This Rusty film has a bigger dose of Rusty than has been present since the first film of the series. Also, John Litel and Ann Doran return as Danny's parents Hugh and Ethel, and again give very believable performances. Some more history has been rewritten here, though. In the first film Danny's mom is clearly actually his stepmom - in fact that whole issue is the subject of the first Rusty film. Here we have Ethel talking about how she and Hugh met in college, thus changing Danny's stepmother into his actual mother. This just shows that Columbia probably did not intend to make Rusty into a series until after they made and released the first film, else they would have avoided the whole "alternative family" issue altogether.
Ted Donaldson is definitely growing up by this entry, and he is being given more age-appropriate growing-pain kind of situations to deal with. A good entry in the series with the focus back on the Mitchell family and back on Rusty.
This Rusty film has a bigger dose of Rusty than has been present since the first film of the series. Also, John Litel and Ann Doran return as Danny's parents Hugh and Ethel, and again give very believable performances. Some more history has been rewritten here, though. In the first film Danny's mom is clearly actually his stepmom - in fact that whole issue is the subject of the first Rusty film. Here we have Ethel talking about how she and Hugh met in college, thus changing Danny's stepmother into his actual mother. This just shows that Columbia probably did not intend to make Rusty into a series until after they made and released the first film, else they would have avoided the whole "alternative family" issue altogether.
Ted Donaldson is definitely growing up by this entry, and he is being given more age-appropriate growing-pain kind of situations to deal with. A good entry in the series with the focus back on the Mitchell family and back on Rusty.