Little Mickey Grogan is a 1927 American comedy-drama film directed by James Leo Meehan and written by Dwight Cummins, Dorothy Yost and Charles Kerr.
The film stars Frankie Darro, Lassie Lou Ahern, Jobyna Ralston, Carroll Nye, Eugene Jackson, William Scott and Vadim Uraneff.
[1][2][3] Mickey Grogan (Frankie Darro), a nine-year old vagabond of the streets, assumes the responsibility for the well-being of a fellow homeless waif (Susan Dale, played by Lassie Lou Ahern), a sensitive architect named Jeffrey Shore (Carroll Nye) who is out of work for being too poor to pay for an operation necessary to save his remaining vision, and a kind-hearted office worker (Winnie, played by Jobyna Ralston) who is being stalked by a belligent Al Nevers (Billy Scott) as his overbearing attentions increasingly turn violent.
In between the assistance he gives others, he tries to make a living from selling discarded items from the city dump and provides moments of vivacious street entertainment with fellow dancers Susan Dale and a strangely uncredited Eugene Jackson.
Instead, it emerges neither as a neorealist film nor as a Buñuelian-type surrealist text, but as an engagingly well-polished thematic and stylistic example of what would become, with the consolidation of the studio system around 1930, classical Hollywood cinema.
Although noting the differences between them, Crouse theorizes that Emprey might have conceived of the character Mickey Grogan based on his time in France where Louis Feuillade's Bout de Zan formed the basis of a popular serial that ran from 1912 to 1916.
Fresh off the success of her role as Little Harry in Universal's epic, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Pollard, 1927), Lassie Lou Ahern was cast opposite him.
The force that brought the Emprey stories to FBO was writer Gene Statton-Porter, one of the biggest bestselling authors of the early twentieth century, of which A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) is her most well-known.
Restoration on Little Mickey Grogan begin in 2015 when surviving cast member Lassie Lou Ahern approached Jeffrey Crouse to ask whether her final silent film existed anymore.
Among those who championed the restoration were Kevin Brownlow, Diana Serra Cary, George Toles, Leonard Maltin, Michael Feinstein, David Shepard, Guy Maddin, and Carol Cling.
Carol Cling, "Lassie Lou Ahern finally hopes to see silent movie she acted in as a child," Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 11, 2016, https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/lassie-lou-ahern-hopes-to-finally-see-silent-movie-she-acted-in-as-a-child/.