Confessions of a Co-Ed (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching Strike on Sunday, May 31 my husband Charles and I wanted something at least a bit lighter, and we got it – sort of – with a film called Confessions of a Co-Ed, made by Paramount in 1931 which we discovered from a YouTube film clip featuring Bing Crosby and the other two members of the Rhythm Boys vocal trio, Harry Barris and Al Rinker (singer Mildred Bailey’s brother) performing live at a college party (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yib17tXwxj4). Confessions of a Co-Ed was co-directed by David Burton and Dudley Murphy; Burton is a name I’m not familiar with but I’m quite fond of Murphy, mainly for the three films he made featuring African-American performers: the shorts St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith and Black and Tan with Duke Ellington (both 1929) and the feature The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson, loosely based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. Murphy had also proven in his 1932 film The Sport Parade that he could make an effective movie without Black principals, though that was a “serious” exposé of the college athletic scandals of the early 1930’s the Marx Brothers vividly parodied in Horse Feathers (1932). One odd thing about Confessions of a Co-Ed is that there are no writing credits, either on the film itself or on its imdb.com page; I’m guessing Burton and Murphy also wrote the script, though it’s possible Paramount didn’t credit any writers because the conceit behind the film is it’s based on a diary written by its central character, Patricia Harper (Sylvia Sidney), during and after her days as a co-ed at “Stafford College” in California. (I suspect we were supposed to read it as the real-life Stanford University.) Patricia gets caught in a romantic triangle between fraternity brothers and roommates Dan Carter (Phillips Holmes) and Hal Evans (Norman Foster, who would later become a director and co-direct the 1942 thriller Journey into Fear with Orson Welles).

The romantic triangle turns into a romantic quadrilateral with the arrival of Peggy Wilson (Claudia Dell, who a year later played opposite Tom Mix in the first version of Destry Rides Again), Pat’s sorority sister and Dan’s former girlfriend. The scene with Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys occurs early on at a fraternity party at which various couples are dancing, and Bing is enough in the action that Dan addresses him by name and briefly interrupts his singing of “Out of Nowhere” while he’s dancing by. (Later the Rhythm Boys do a joint performance of the song “Ya Got Love.”) Peggy warns Pat off Dan by claiming that it’s wrong for a sorority sister to steal one of her sisters’ boyfriends, and Peggy also tells Pat about Dan’s various pickup lines, including, “You’re the first girl I’ve met whom I’d rather talk to than kiss.” Of course Pat fell for that one; it’s already been established that she’s a serious student when she was shown inside a chemistry lab after Hal, the son of a big-shot attorney who’s also a Stafford trustee (as was his father before him), pulled rank and got her into the class in the first place. (It was nice to see at least one scene acknowledging the “education” part of higher education; most collegiate movies from this period totally ignored it.) Pat is well enough aware that she’s not the equal of Peggy or some of the other, hotter sorority babes in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex; she even asks why Dan would be interested in her instead of one of the more conventionally attractive people. The plot heats up one night when Dan takes Peggy out to Lovers’ Lane in Hal’s car, which he's borrowed for the occasion. Of course by then any residual affection between Dan and Peggy has died out, at least on his part, and he’s just going through the motions.

The college administration has declared Lovers’ Lane off limits and there’s a police officer on a motorcycle ready to bust the errant students just for being there (though I couldn’t help but wonder what the charge would be). Dan and Peggy are the last ones to get away, the motorcycle cop gives chase, and just as I was beginning to wonder how the chase would end – either Dan would crash the car or the cop would crash his motorcycle – the anonymous writers made both happen. Dan’s car has a front-wheel blowout, which causes him to lose control and crash into the bike cop. Dan and Peggy desert the scene, but Peggy is caught when her vanity case is found in the wrecked car. Confronted by the college dean of women, she admits it was hers and is expelled from school and forced to work as a coffee-shop hostess to stay in town. Two months pass, and Pat, Dan, and the other remaining students take a ski trip to Lake Tahoe (the only clue we get as to the film’s overall geography), whereupon Dan and Pat sneak out for the night and manage to have sex in a deserted cabin usually occupied by the park ranger. Of course, this being a 1931 movie, this inevitably leads to the “inevitable pregnancy at a single contact” producer David O. Selznick liked to ridicule. Pat realizes she is pregnant, and Peggy, who’s briefly returned to the Stafford campus to pick up her belongings, Hal is still interested in marrying Pat, but Pat is not only not in love with Hal but she’s unable to tell Dan that she’s about to have his child because in the meantime Hal, out of jealousy over Pat’s attachment to Dan, has ratted out Dan to the college authorities and he’s been expelled, too. He gets away in a cab just before Pat goes out to confront him, and he spends the next three years in South America and returns home to find Pat and Hal in an uncertain marriage built on the lie that Pat’s child, a son played by veteran child actor Dickie Moore, is Hal’s. At Peggy’s urging, the night Dan left Pat had written Hal a letter explaining the whole situation; Pat asked Peggy to give Hal the letter but Peggy, after having told her to write it in the first place, ostentatiously burned it instead.

Three years later, Dan and Hal reconnect and Dan tells Hal he’s returned to the U.S. to pick up where he left off with the woman he really loves, and Hal of course has no idea that Dan’s dream girl is Hal’s wife. When Dan confronts Hal and demands that Hal give up Pat so they can get back together and their son can be raised by both his biological parents, Hal at first angrily refuses but then accepts the inevitable and Dan and Pat get back together and take the boy with them. The End. Confessions of a Co-Ed is a rather strange movie in that the first third is incredibly creatively directed; Burton, Murphy, and cinematographer Lee Garmes (who for some reason is credited as the film’s editor on its Wikipedia page; John Leipold, actually the film’s composer, is given the cinematography credit) keep the camera in almost constant motion as it dollies through the halls and pathways of the Stafford campus and discovers the characters along the way. Alas, the latter two-thirds turns conventional in terms of both the plot situations (let’s face it, even in the so-called “pre-Code” era there weren’t many alternatives as to how to present a situation in which a sympathetic character becomes pregnant without marriage) and the directorial style. I remember reading in James Curtiss’s biography of James Whale that in the early 1930’s there was a rather strange cold war in Hollywood between directors who wanted to do more moving-camera shots and cinematographers who rebelled because they took longer to light. Though Lee Garmes was known as one of the more creative and innovative cameramen in the business, it’s possible even he put his foot down and told Murphy and Burton to knock it off with the moving-camera shots. Confessions of a Co-Ed lurches to a conclusion that we’re supposed to read as a happy ending even though it seems like Pat is trading an affluent, albeit unhappy, existence for a more hand-to-mouth one.

Charles likes Phillips Holmes as an actor considerably more than I do (I think he finds him physically attractive), but like John Gilbert in his talkies Holmes seems to have only the barest idea of how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. He didn’t even have the excuse of having started in silent films that Gilbert did, and after Holmes’s film career petered out in 1938 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force only to be killed when his transport plane crashed. I know Charles used to get irritated with me when I’d do thought experiments like this, but think of this movie with the young Cary Grant (who showed his mature acting chops just a year later with his first feature, This Is the Night, also for Paramount) in Holmes’s role. Sylvia Sidney went on to a long and storied career into the 1980’s, when she played the grandmother of a Gay AIDS patient in the first TV-movie about the syndrome, An Early Frost. But of all the people in this movie it was Bing Crosby who went on to the longest and most legendary career. Indeed, just a year after this film was made, Paramount would sign Crosby, whose Cremo Cigars radio show had made him a nationwide star, to a term contract that would last a quarter-century and make both of them tons of money. This morning both Charles and I were joking, “Who else recorded with both Paul Whiteman and David Bowie?” One thing that’s quite apparent in this film is how early in his life Crosby got male pattern baldness; one can see his high hairline in his closeups, and in later movies and most public appearances thereafter he’d wear a toupée (or, as he called it, his “brain doily”). Frank Capra recalled that in the two films he and Crosby made together, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951), Crosby was insanely picky over his toupée and refused to emerge from his dressing room until he had it on just right.