by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Sweetheart
of the Campus, a 1941 musical from
Columbia that was Ruby Keeler’s last film, and which Turner Classic Movies had
shown as part of a tribute to its director, Edward Dmytryk. It turned out to be
a quite engaging modest musical, with serviceable if not truly great songs and
a pleasant if clichéd plot. Besides Keeler, the stars were bandleader Ozzie
Nelson and his wife (since 1935 — for some reason, probably due to a misreading
of a Films of the Golden Age article, I’d thought they hadn’t married until much later) and band
singer Harriet Hilliard, who in this film played characters creatively named
“Ozzie Norton” and “Harriet Hale.” In the script by Robert Hardy Andrews (for
some reason billed with the wrong middle initial, “D.”) and Edmund L. Hartmann,
“Ozzie Norton”’s featured attraction is dancer Betty Blake (Ruby Keeler), who’s
in love with him. They’re about to open at a club near the campus of Lambeth
Technological Institute — too near, as it turns out, since Minnie Lambeth Sparr (Kathleen Howard, a
Margaret Dumont type), who’s the heir of the college’s founder, is determined
to drive it out of business by closing down the athletic program, arts and
music, and anything else that might draw students by making their Lambeth
experience fun. She takes advantage of a local law that says a nightclub can’t
be located within five miles of a college to have the place padlocked by the
local sheriff (Don Beddoe).
Harriet Hale (Harriet Hilliard), apparently the one
decent human being on the college staff, works out a plan to save the
livelihoods of Betty, Ozzie and their bandmates by enrolling them at Lambeth as
students and having them stage their show inside the college gym. She gets them
past the entrance exam by teaching them the answers by rote — the college’s
education director, Dr. Bailey (Byron Foulger), gives the same test again and
again — and “Ozzie Norton” stages a weekly experimental television broadcast
over the college’s station, WOO. (It’s interesting that the television
equipment — both the cameras and the receiving sets — look like what’s familiar
to us now, though by the time this movie was made TV stations and sets already
existed — NBC had started TV broadcasting in New York City in 1939 but the
program was put on hiatus due to the U.S. involvement in World War II. So the
filmmakers could show actually existing TV equipment instead of the
preposterous-looking sci-fi gadgetry in mid-1930’s films like Murder by
Television and Columbia’s own Trapped
by Television.) Sparr, who’s determined
to close Lambeth so she can turn it into a girls’ seminary, is incensed that as
the only female student among 300 males, Betty Blake is making Lambeth popular
and helping the school reach their quota of 300 students, which it needs to
stay in business under the terms of John Lambeth’s will. She has Dr. Bailey
give a really tough set of final exams to flunk out as many of the new Lambeth
enrollees as possible — including a group of football players who’ve been
working the college circuit for up to 12 years (yet another film that jokes
about the practice of colleges then of hiring professional “ringers” to beef up
their football teams — a scandal depicted in several serious dramatic films in
the 1930’s and hilariously spoofed in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers) — but Ozzie and Betty are able to keep their
broadcasts going even as Betty gets an offer from a Broadway producer and opens
on the Main Stem as a huge overnight star. Alas, Betty loses Ozzie to Harriet
Hale — she even laments how often she hears the words “Ozzie and Harriet” (“you
say it like they go together, like ham and eggs!”) three years before the
couple started their Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet radio sitcom that eventually transferred to TV in
1952 and made them TV stars for real 11 years after this movie. I joked about
the former Mrs. Al Jolson taking the present and future Mrs. Ozzie Nelson aside
and telling her, “Being married to someone more famous than you are isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be.”
Sweetheart of the Campus is one of those films from the studio era that
isn’t a world-beater but does achieve a nice level of entertainment — it’s certainly better than
Keeler’s last film for Warner Bros., Ready, Willing and Able in 1937 (in the intervening four years she made
just one other movie, the RKO non-musical Mother Carey’s Chickens in 1938, which I’ve heard so many ghastly things
about I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit through it) — and one of the
nicest things about it is it gives us a chance to see what a good dancer Ruby Keeler
really was. In her most famous films at Warners she’d been surrounded by Busby
Berkeley’s platoons of choristers, who had got in her way; also, according to
one report I’ve read in 42nd Street she’d been doing something closer to clog-dancing
than tap-dancing, wearing wooden (or at least wooden-heeled) shoes which
required her to stomp on the floor hard to make an audible tap sound — which
may explain why she looked jerky in the solo bits. Here she’s doing normal tap
dancing and doing it spectacularly well, especially in the boogie-woogie number
that was obviously put into the film to show the audience that Ruby Keeler (and
Ozzie Nelson) could swing, and she’s at least a serviceable actress and
sometimes better than that, especially when she has to play her disappointment
that Ozzie is going to end up with Harriet instead of her.
