by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was College
Holiday, a 1936 Paramount musical
which I recorded off TCM just after The Big Broadcast of 1937 — TCM paired the two because they’re the only two
movies Jack Benny and George Burns ever made together, despite their long
friendship and history of guest-starring on each other’s radio and TV shows. College
Holiday is a bland title for a
truly weird movie — it begins conventionally enough, at a college dance (well
staged by director Frank Tuttle, choreographer Dave Gould — who worked on the
first two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, Flying Down to Rio and The Gay Divorcée, and cinematographers Théodor Sparkuhl and William
C. Mellor, whose presence here virtually defines the term “overqualified”), at
which romantic leads Dick Winters (Leif Erickson, who puts the rest of this
cast one degree of separation from James Dean — they worked together on that bizarre
1951 TV-movie Hill Number One, a Biblical tale of the aftermath of the crucifixion in which Erickson
was Pontius Pilate and Dean the Apostle John) and Sylvia Smith (Marsha Hunt)
meet, exchange kisses (and slaps) and he falls so madly in love with her he
determines to track her down even though all he knows is that her last name is
“Smith” (yeah, that’s a lot of help!) and she’s returning to her home base of Santa Teresa,
California (really an alias for Santa Barbara — where some exteriors for this
film were actually shot — as it would be starting in the 1980’s for mystery
writer Sue Grafton as well) for the summer, where she helps her father (Harry
Hayden) run a hotel.
Alas, dad took in J. Davis Bowster (Jack Benny,
top-billed) as a junior partner and left Bowster in charge — and as a result
the hotel is about to go broke and get foreclosed on by its mortgage holder.
Its mortgage holder is Carola P. Gaye (Mary Boland), an eccentric heiress with
a penchant for bizarre fads. Her latest is Greek revivalism and eugenics, both
of which have come to her in the person of her current boyfriend, “Hercules”
Dove (Étienne Girardot). Faced with immediate eviction by Sheriff John J.
Trimble (Jed Prouty, who made a career, it seems, playing dog-faced sheriffs
about to evict the nice people in Depression-era melodramas), Bowster and
Sylvia Smith manage to talk the hotel’s creditors into giving him a one-month
extension, during which time Bowster hopes to attract enough collegians on
summer break both to perform at the hotel and be its paying guests, thereby
putting it into the black. Only Carola and “Hercules” will sanction this only
if they can turn it into a eugenic experiment, which means that the young men
from men’s colleges and the young women from women’s colleges have to be
strictly segregated on the train bringing them out (represented, oddly, by a cartoon train moving over model mountains!), and Bowster’s
attempts to do this are at least moderately amusing even if they don’t have
quite the obsessive quality of the Boy Scout troupe’s interferences with Bob
Hope’s would-be amours in
Hope’s bizarre 1949 dark comedy The Great Lover. Then the train arrives in “Santa Teresa” and we
learn that the person Carola and “Hercules” trust to pick which young men and
which young women are the perfect eugenic matches is “Hercules”’ daughter
Calliope, played by … Gracie Allen.
The moment Gracie and George Burns make
their entrance — racing down the L.A. streets in a chariot drawn by four
horses, in viscerally exciting camera setups that make it virtually certain
director Tuttle had seen the 1926 Ben-Hur — the movie turns delightfully surrealistic, filled with rapid-fire
Burns and Allen gags and an overall demented sensibility that makes it
difficult to believe Preston Sturges wasn’t on the writing committee. (Four
writers are credited — J. P. McEvoy,
Harlan Ware, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” co-writer Jay Gorney and Henry
Myers — and imdb.com lists three others: Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Walter
DeLeon and former Mack Sennett comedy star Bobby Vernon.) The movie contains
its share of clichés — notably the back room of the hotel theatre into which
Carola, “Hercules,” the sheriff and anyone else who might interfere with the
big show at the end is locked by stagehand Ben Blue, who also “wires” the chair
in which Gracie Allen is doing the eugenic judging so she gets shocks to her
rear that she interprets as signals from the ether as to who should be matched
with whom — but overall it’s a delightful romp that gets considerably more
delightful once George and Gracie enter and do both crazy dialogue and enticing
visual gags. The big finale is a minstrel show — one of those insane Hollywood
productions with rows upon rows of people in blackface (far more than the
regulation nine-member troupe of most real minstrel shows) — and an astonishing
effect in which Martha Raye (who’s good but was clearly warming up for her
later and even better films) is shown first in blackface and then in whiteface
as the colored filters on her stage lights change and either reveal or conceal
her dark makeup. This was a special-effects gimmick invented by Roy Pomeroy at
Paramount in 1923 to achieve the effect Cecil B. DeMille wanted for the silent
film The Ten Commandments of having Moses’ sister Miriam develop leprosy right before our eyes,
and it was used several times after that — notably in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932
film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so Fredric March could change from Jekyll to Hyde on screen without
cutaways or double-exposure dissolves. But it’s odd, to say the least, to see a
1936 film that shows us
on-screen how a major special effect was done!
I suspect the double-whammy of
political incorrectness — eugenics and minstrelsy — is what’s responsible for this uneven but often dementedly
hilarious film being almost totally forgotten today; eugenics ceased to be a
laughing matter after World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust (though
that didn’t stop Arnold Belgard, writer of the 1957 film Bop Girl Goes
Calypso, from making the
villainess of that piece a eugenics fanatic who believes she’s the perfect
scientific match for the film’s male lead — who, of course, has picked his true
girlfriend in more normal human fashion). Another oddity is this is an early
film pairing talented tap dancers Johnny Downs and Eleanore Whitney, whom
Paramount briefly tried to build up into their answer to Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers at RKO, and they do two numbers — including an opening one which
starts with them tapping on the floor while they’re sitting on chairs, then
pushing the chairs around with their tapping feet. (I can imagine the writers
thinking, “Astaire and Rogers dance on furniture? We’ll go one better and make
the furniture dance!”) The problem is
they are both excellent dancers but neither has a discernible personality — one
doesn’t care about them the way one
does about Fred and Ginger — and though I don’t know what happened to Eleanore
Whitney after this, Johnny Downs ended up as the male lead in PRC’s 1942 horror
movie The Mad Monster and did
a spectacular but all too brief dance solo in Warners’ 1945 George Gershwin
biopic Rhapsody in Blue. One
problem with College Holiday is the lack of any truly great songs — aside from Leo Robin’s and Ralph
Rainger’s “Love in Bloom,” which is used only for scratchy violin bits by Jack
Benny — but it’s still a very funny movie (especially when Burns and Allen are
on screen) and one that deserves to be better known.
