Last Sunday morning (it may have actually been Saturday morning, I can't really remember; if anyone knows for sure, please feel free to have this post deleted for being off topic), I was scanning through the cable TV guide and saw a listing for Leave 'Em Laughing which described the film like this: "Mickey Rooney plays a circus clown who raises homeless children."
Naturally, I had to watch.
My hope was that he was an evil circus clown, and he was raising an army of homeless children as his personal Circus of Crime. I don't know about you, but the idea of Mickey Rooney as an clownfaced cult leader traveling from town to town, recruiting orphans into his reign of criminal terror is something I've been waiting to see for years without even knowing it.
I don't want to spoil anything, but it turns out Mickey is not an evil circus clown. It was still worth watching for a scene near the end where Mickey Rooney forces a bedridden dying man into a wheelchair and takes him up to a roof against his will, where Mickey forces the dying man to watch as he climbs up onto the edge of the roof to commit suicide. So, kind of a push, really.
