by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was
an item from a 20-film box of classic movie musicals I’d just ordered from
Critics’ Choice Video, though it was neither a classic nor much of a musical:
it was Let’s Go Collegiate, a 1941 Monogram production and one of the first films they made that
gave Gale Storm much of a showcase. The story takes place at Rawley University,
whose star “stroke” on their rowing team (from what they showed in this movie I
gathered the “stroke” is the guy who sits in front next to the coxswain and has
just one oar instead of two; he’s supposed to supply the main power and “oomph”
to move the racing shell in the water), Bill Terry, has just been drafted (this
was in the wake of America’s
first peacetime draft and on the eve of our entry into World War II, and in
addition to inspiring mega-hits like Abbott and Costello’s star-making Buck
Privates those realities also
affected cheap, tacky movies like this). The team’s coxswain, Frankie Monahan
(Frankie Darro, in a nothing role that’s quite a comedown for him after seeing
him five years earlier in Born to Fight, an engaging indie that proved Darro could genuinely act), and the
captain, Tad (Jackie Moran), decide to recruit another stroke and find him in
Herk (short for “Hercules”) Bevans (Frank Sully) when they see Herk lift up a
heavy safe and load it onto a flatbed truck. The fact that it’s a safe rather
than some more innocuous sort of heavy object makes us suspicious of him
immediately – as does the dese-dem-dose accent with which Sully delivers Herk’s
lines – but it’s not until the very end of the movie that Herk’s past gets
revealed. In the meantime, Frankie and Tad only intend to pass off Herk as
Terry at their big frat party introducing him (Charles said, “What kind of
fraternity is it where everybody is over 30?” – and I replied, “Phi Delta
Monogram”) and then announce the drafting of (the real) Bill Terry afterwards –
only Herk insists on staying in school and actually rowing once he gets a load
of Bess Martin (Marcia Mae Jones), Tad’s girlfriend; and Midge Lawrence (Gale
Storm), Frankie’s girlfriend, and decides he wants both of them (enough to
propose marriage to both of them by the time the movie is out – I joked, “Hey,
this is Rawley, not BYU!”).
Edmond Kelso’s script goes through the usual
complications of a college athletic movie, including the queeny Professor
Whitaker (Billy Griffith) – one wonders, “Who was the head of the teachers’
college that trained him, Quentin Crisp?” – who threatens to throw both Frankie
and Tad off the rowing team because they’ve spent so much time tutoring Herk
that their own grades have fallen off; and the final complication that, to no
one’s surprise (no one in the audience, anyway; it comes as a bolt out of the
blue to the characters!), Herk is really a wanted bank robber, and the two
alumni who are there to witness the big championship rowing race, Speed Dorman
(Frank Faylen) and “Bullet” Bill Miller (Paul Maxey), lock up government agent
Slugger Wilson (Tristram Coffin) until the big race starts so he can’t arrest
Herk until the race is over. Also there’s a running gag about Herk’s
seasickness, for which Frankie is feeding him chocolate-flavored pills – though
the coach (Barton Yarborough) discovers them and confiscates them before the
big race and Frankie instead loads up with mothballs, which have a speed-like
effect on Herk, thereby giving Rawley an exciting (as exciting as it could be
given the stock footage available to Monogram, anyway) come-from-behind finish
in the race.
At least part of the appeal of this film comes from the three
people of color in the cast: Keye Luke, rather wasted as the coach’s assistant
(especially since Luke played an athlete himself, a U.S. Olympic swimmer, in
the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Olympics!); Mantan Moreland, as the fraternity’s chauffeur delivering his
marvelously dry “spin” on the African-American servant stereotype (most notably
when he’s tutoring Herk for his anatomy exam – or rather Herk is using Mantan’s
head as a guinea pig – he even gets to sing, or at least rap, the song “Let’s
Do a Little Dreamin’” in a quartet at the end); and Marguerite Whitten, the
cook, who’s there mainly to give Mantan an appropriately colored love interest
in the sort of playfully bantering mold of Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel in
the 1936 Universal Show Boat. Let’s Go Collegiate is a pretty predictable movie but it’s still mild fun, appealing when
the people of color are on the screen or when Gale Storm is singing (two decent
but undistinguished vehicles, “Sweet Sixteen” and “Look What You’ve Done to
Me,” but songs which at least pointed out how good she could be), and directed
by the Boy Named Jean Yarbrough in typically efficient if uncreative fashion.
