THE HUMAN COMEDY on Blu-Ray

Purchase at MovieZyng.com by clicking the image above

Review by John Larkin

Warner Archive could not have timed this release any better. With Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY becoming one of the biggest cinematic events of 2026, along comes what could reasonably be described as a 1943 American variation on Homer’s ancient story.

To be clear, THE HUMAN COMEDY is not a direct adaptation of THE ODYSSEY. Mickey Rooney is no Matt Damon, and his bicycle is certainly no Greek warship. He does not encounter the Cyclops, resist the Sirens or incur the wrath of Poseidon. His journey takes place within the fictional town of Ithaca, California, where he delivers telegrams to families waiting for news of their loved ones during World War II. The dangers are less spectacular, but the emotional stakes can be every bit as great.

William Saroyan essentially took the emotional architecture of THE ODYSSEY and transplanted it into small town America. Ithaca remains the home to which soldiers hope to return. One of the central characters is named Homer, his little brother is named Ulysses and their older brother Marcus is away fighting a war. Families wait at home while men are sent into an uncertain world, and the question underlying everything is the same one that has endured since the original epic: Who will make it back?

That connection made me especially interested in revisiting THE HUMAN COMEDY. I first saw it projected on film while attending a film history class at the School of Visual Arts. My teacher, Gene Stavis, who has since passed away, showed us a wide range of classic films and exposed us to a lot of things I probably would not have encountered on my own at that age.

My memory of THE HUMAN COMEDY had grown hazy over the years. Compared with some of the more famous titles we watched, this one felt slightly obscure to me, but I remembered its atmosphere. I remembered something gentle, melancholy and unmistakably of its time. Seeing it again, that memory was accurate, but there is much more going on beneath its idealized vision of wartime America than I recalled.

Mickey Rooney plays Homer Macauley, a high school student who takes a night job delivering telegrams to help support his widowed mother and younger siblings while Marcus, played by Van Johnson, is away in the Army. Homer begins the job with the excitement of a boy being trusted with an adult responsibility. He likes riding his bicycle around town and being recognized as someone doing important work. It does not take long, however, for him to discover exactly what some of those messages contain.

At a time when the arrival of a telegram could mean the worst possible news from the War Department, Homer becomes an intermediary between the fighting overseas and the families waiting at home. He is still a child, but he is repeatedly asked to carry adult grief from the telegraph office to someone’s front door.

That gives the film a dramatic foundation considerably darker than the title might suggest. The “comedy” is not comedy in the modern sense. It refers to the human comedy as the full accumulation of ordinary life, encompassing humor, embarrassment, childhood curiosity, first love, loneliness, death and grief. The film moves episodically through Ithaca, observing the Macauley family and the various people Homer encounters. There is less emphasis on a tightly constructed plot than on creating a portrait of a community trying to preserve its decency while the war intrudes upon it.

The Odyssey parallels extend beyond the names. In the ancient poem, Ithaca is the distant home that Odysseus spends years trying to reach. In THE HUMAN COMEDY, Ithaca is the place Homer never leaves, yet he must travel through it and come to understand it. Matt Damon’s Odysseus crosses oceans to get back to Ithaca. Mickey Rooney’s Homer crosses town on a bicycle and discovers that even home can contain an entire world of sorrow.

There is also an interesting reversal in Homer’s name. He is not the Odysseus figure. He is closer to the storyteller. Every telegram introduces him to another part of the community’s collective experience. Through Homer, we see the stories of Ithaca’s mothers, children, workers, soldiers and grieving families. Little Ulysses, whose name is the Roman form of Odysseus, represents the innocence Homer is gradually leaving behind.

Marcus and his fellow soldiers supply the story’s most direct connection to the idea of a dangerous journey and an uncertain homecoming. The women of Ithaca wait for them without knowing whether they will return. There is no single Penelope equivalent, but the same anxiety hangs over the Macauley household and the entire town. Home is presented not simply as a location, but as the collection of people who remember you, worry about you and keep a place for you.

The film is sentimental, sometimes unapologetically so. There are speeches, songs, spiritual observations and moments designed specifically to bring an audience to tears. MGM was not exactly known for emotional restraint, and THE HUMAN COMEDY occasionally pours on the sweetness until it threatens to overwhelm Saroyan’s more complicated ideas. If Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY gives us crashing waves and towering mythological threats, Clarence Brown’s film sometimes makes do with Herbert Stothart’s score rising dramatically beneath a heartfelt speech.

Some of its idealized vision of small town America can feel manufactured when viewed more than eighty years later. Its adult romantic subplot also occupies more time than it needs, occasionally pulling attention away from Homer and the Macauley family. Yet the film’s sincerity is difficult to dismiss. Its best moments are so direct and emotionally honest that they overcome the heavier layers of MGM sweetness.

The scene in which Homer must deliver his first death notice remains especially powerful. It is not treated merely as a plot development. The film allows us to feel the unbearable distance between the impersonal language of the telegram and the mother standing in front of him. Homer is still a boy, yet he is suddenly expected to carry another person’s grief. War is taking place somewhere far away, but its consequences enter Ithaca one envelope at a time.

Rooney is excellent and much more restrained than the popular image of him might lead someone to expect. He was already one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, closely associated with the Andy Hardy pictures and his energetic musicals with Judy Garland. Here, director Clarence Brown draws something quieter from him. Homer is enthusiastic and impulsive, but Rooney never loses sight of the sadness accumulating beneath that energy. He makes the character’s movement from innocence toward experience feel gradual and believable.

Saroyan reportedly conceived Homer with Rooney in mind, and it is easy to understand why. Rooney could move rapidly between humor and anguish without making the transition feel artificial. He was only twenty-two when the film was released, but there is an unusual emotional maturity in his performance. It earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, his second competitive acting nomination after BABES IN ARMS.

Rooney is surrounded by an unusually rich MGM ensemble. Frank Morgan, best remembered as the title character in THE WIZARD OF OZ, is wonderful as Willie Grogan, the aging telegraph operator who becomes Homer’s mentor. Grogan’s drinking initially supplies some of the film’s humor, but it gradually reveals itself as a defense against the endless stream of tragic messages passing through the office. He is the man receiving the news before Homer must deliver it, and the emotional cost of that responsibility has clearly accumulated over many years.

Fay Bainter brings quiet strength to Mrs. Macauley, while Donna Reed and Van Johnson appear as Homer’s older siblings, Bess and Marcus. Ray Collins provides the intermittent narration as the deceased Macauley father, whose spiritual presence gives the story the feeling of a family being watched over even as it confronts loss.

Jackie “Butch” Jenkins made his screen debut as four-year-old Ulysses and nearly steals the picture with an exceptionally natural performance. A young Robert Mitchum also turns up in a small role as one of the soldiers, listed in the cast as Bob Mitchum. The supporting cast is so deep that familiar faces appear almost casually throughout the film.

Another interesting element of THE HUMAN COMEDY is that it did not begin as an adaptation of Saroyan’s novel. Saroyan first wrote it directly for the screen. MGM purchased his approximately 240-page screenplay in 1942 for a reported $60,000, with Saroyan hoping to produce and direct it himself.

After Saroyan made a short film as a directing test, MGM decided not to let him direct THE HUMAN COMEDY. King Vidor was considered before Clarence Brown ultimately took over, with Howard Estabrook assigned to reduce Saroyan’s sprawling screenplay to approximately two hours. Saroyan left MGM and transformed his material into a novel, which was published around the time of the film’s release and became a bestseller.

It is a fascinating reversal of the usual process. The screenplay came first, followed by the novel that many people would later assume had been the movie’s original source. Saroyan may have lost control of the production, but he received the Academy Award for Best Original Motion Picture Story.

Clarence Brown also served as the film’s producer. Brown was one of MGM’s most dependable and sensitive directors, particularly when working with young performers and stories centered on families. He would reunite with Rooney for NATIONAL VELVET and later direct THE YEARLING, another film about childhood, family and loss. Brown eventually accumulated six Academy Award nominations for directing without winning, and THE HUMAN COMEDY contains some of his most delicate work.

Harry Stradling’s black and white cinematography is equally important. His photography balances the warmth of the Macauley home and the daylight activity of Ithaca with the shadows of the telegraph office and Homer’s nighttime deliveries. The town is presented as an idealized American community, but darkness is never far beyond its windows.

THE HUMAN COMEDY brought Stradling the first of what would eventually be fourteen Academy Award nominations. He later won for THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and MY FAIR LADY. His work here gives Saroyan’s American Ithaca a visual identity that exists somewhere between a real California town and a half remembered dream of home.

The film received five Academy Award nominations overall. In addition to Rooney, Brown and Stradling, it was nominated for Best Picture, while Saroyan won for his original story. THE HUMAN COMEDY was also reportedly Louis B. Mayer’s favorite of all the films made during his long tenure at MGM. Its vision of family, community, patriotism and essential human goodness embodies much of what Mayer wanted MGM to represent.

Warner Archive’s new Blu-ray presents THE HUMAN COMEDY in a 2026 1080p master created from a 4K scan of the best surviving preservation elements. That wording is important because the release is not claiming access to the original camera negative. Considering the age and condition of the available materials, the presentation is quite handsome.

The image retains a natural film texture, with pleasing grayscale, stable contrast and a substantial improvement in fine detail over older standard definition presentations. There are occasional variations in density and sharpness that reflect the surviving sources, but nothing that seriously distracts from the film. The original 1.37:1 composition is correctly presented with side mattes, and the 117 minute feature is housed on a BD-50.

The original mono soundtrack is presented in DTS HD Master Audio 2.0. Dialogue is clean and intelligible, while Stothart’s wistful score and the film’s many traditional songs retain an appropriate fullness without being artificially expanded into a modern surround mix. English SDH subtitles are included.

Warner Archive has also assembled a valuable selection of period supplements. The disc contains a July 12, 1943 SCREEN GUILD THEATER radio adaptation featuring Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan, along with a September 9, 1949 SCREEN DIRECTOR’S PLAYHOUSE broadcast featuring Rooney and Clarence Brown. Hearing Rooney return to Homer in a different medium makes both programs more than disposable curiosities.

The disc also includes Tex Avery’s wartime MGM cartoon BLITZ WOLF, the MGM short subject DON’T YOU BELIEVE IT and the original theatrical trailer. There is no new commentary or retrospective documentary, but the radio programs and original theatrical material place the film within its historical moment more effectively than a collection of promotional interviews probably could.

THE HUMAN COMEDY can certainly be criticized for idealizing America and pushing its emotions forcefully. It is a product of 1943, made for an audience living with the immediate fear that the next telegram might arrive at its own door. That historical context matters. Beneath the patriotic surface is a film about children being forced to understand death, adults attempting to shield them from it and an entire community trying to remain compassionate under extraordinary pressure.

Returning to it after first encountering it in Gene Stavis’s class, I understand why its atmosphere remained with me even when most of the plot had faded from memory. THE HUMAN COMEDY is not a perfect film, but it is a sincere and frequently beautiful piece of wartime Americana.

Warner Archive’s Blu-ray gives this slightly less familiar MGM classic the thoughtful presentation it deserves. Arriving just as THE ODYSSEY has returned to the center of popular culture, THE HUMAN COMEDY now feels less like an artifact being pulled from the past and more like another chapter in a story we apparently never stop telling.