The Human Comedy

In an effort to support his family while his older brother, Marcus (Van Johnson), is away at war, Homer (Mickey Rooney) gets a job delivering telegrams for the local telegraph office. His sensitive manager, Tom Spangler (James Craig), and an elderly and wise drunken telegrapher, Willie Grogan (Frank Morgan), help Homer face the painful messages that are often tapped across the telegraph wire as he learns to accept the harsh realities of war. With the help of his faithful widowed mother (Fay Bainter), Homer navigates his new job while enduring the joys and defeats of high school in his small and charming hometown of Ithaca, California. This poignant vision of life in 1940s America, poignantly directed by Clarence Brown, follows the miniadventures of Homer's family, including a late-night rendevous between his blushing older sister Bess (Donna Reed) and a lonely soldier (Robert Mitchum). As Homer wavers on the brink of adulthood, his younger brother Ulysses (Jack Jenkin) is free to roam the streets of their idyllic small town without a care in the world in a sweetly sentimental reminder of childhood freedom and exuberance. (official distributor synopsis)