by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was So This Is College, also known as College Days, and was released November 8, 1929. Story-wise it was
a pretty typical college movie of the period, with the shadows of Harold
Lloyd’s masterpiece The Freshman
and the “serious” tales of college athletic heroism Lloyd had vividly and
devastatingly parodied hanging heavily over it. But the movie, which I recorded
from Turner Classic Movies a couple of months ago when they did a program of
college movies to celebrate the start of the new school year, certainly was
packed with “A”-list talent both behind and in front of the cameras. The
director was Sam Wood, who in the silent era had had such prestigious
assignments as Beyond the Rocks
(1923) with Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, and who’d have a long career
well into the sound era (he was one of the “ghost” directors on Gone
With the Wind, which he took over when
Victor Fleming had a nervous breakdown and, with the schedule getting tight,
producer David O. Selznick kept Wood on the project even once Fleming was able
to work again and had them both
shoot simultaneously) even though he’s probably best known today for A
Night at the Opera and A Day at
the Races with the Marx Brothers. The
screenwriters included Joseph W. Farnham (the man who emasculated Erich von
Stroheim’s Greed and is probably
in the same circle of hell as Channing Pollock, who performed a similar
“service” on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis)
and two considerable talents who went on to bigger and better things later, Al
Boasberg (the comedy writer who had already co-written Buster Keaton’s The
General and would later become a radio gag
man for Jack Benny and would also work on A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races) and Delmer Daves (who’d eventually become a
director himself and work on serious
projects like the Bogart-Bacall Dark Passage and other, similarly melodramatic Westerns and noirs), while at least one of the stars, Robert Montgomery
— whom I had difficulty recognizing at first because he looks so young and callow (it’s hard to tell from his rather
gawky performance here that just two years later he was superb in Noël Coward’s
sophisticated comedy Private Lives)
— went on to a major career (including starring in and directing an important if flawed film noir, The Lady in the Lake, based on a Raymond Chandler novel).
So
This Is College is your standard plot in
which University of Southern California (and yes, it’s startling to see the
name of a real college instead of a fictitious one in a 1929 movie) football
stars, fraternity brothers, roommates and best buds Eddie (Elliot Nugent) and
Biff (Robert Montgomery) find their friendship on the rocks when they both fall
for the same girl, flapper-type Baxter (Sally Starr), whom because they find it
hard to say “Baxter” they nickname “Babs.” At first it looks like Biff and Babs
are serious about each other and it’s Eddie who’s the one who’s horning (in
more ways than one) in on them — the two men play a series of nasty tricks on
each other, including stealing each other’s pants so they can’t go out to the
big dance, and in one bizarre scene Biff and Eddie stage a caterpillar race
(they’re on a field trip as part of an entomology class, which is the only
actual education we see in this portrait of “higher education”) to decide which
will get to take Babs to the next dance, which Biff wins because he drugs
Eddie’s caterpillar with formaldehyde (I’m not making this up, you know!). For
some reason these stories of two men playing all these nasty tricks on each
other to compete over one woman were popular for many years — it’s the main
reason why I find the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire musical Holiday Inn almost totally unwatchable between the great Irving
Berlin songs — and instead of the payoff I was expecting, which was that Babs
has her fling with Eddie but decides that Biff is more serious, more grounded
and more in love with her and ends up with him, the writers chose the payoff
that Babs isn’t serious about either
of them because she’s already got an off-campus fiancé who shows up with her at
the big football game that ends the movie and she flashes the fancy engagement
ring (much fancier than either Eddie or Biff could have afforded — we know
Eddie and Biff are broke because Max Davidson appears as a stereotypical Jewish
tailor they keep stiffing for the money they owe him) he’s bought her.
But
though the plot may be hackneyed, the execution certainly isn’t; the script is
peppered with Boasberg’s wisecracks and director Wood totally avoids the
stiffness of many early talkies. With its sometimes offbeat and oblique camera
angles, its fast pacing and, above all, its natural delivery of dialogue — the
actors talk like normal people, they step on each other’s lines and they
completely avoid the mind-numbing pauses between their cues and their own lines
that make many early talkies almost totally unwatchable today (can you say Behind
That Curtain?) — So This Is
College looks more like a film from 1935
than 1929. The only things that “date” it as a late-1920’s instead of a
mid-1930’s product are Sally Starr’s flapper costume (this was a product of the
brief intersection between the flapper craze and talkie films) and the music. So
This Is College isn’t really a musical but
it does contain a few songs, and
they’re charming and add to the action — we can accept these people singing to
entertain themselves, which is what they’re doing in the musical scenes, and
during the college dance the band is being led by a conductor wearing a
black-and-white beanie which at first looked to both Charles and I as if he’d
done something really weird with his hair — but they also date it. The film
also artfully uses stock footage of the real football game between USC and Stanford in 1928 (and
thereby gives us a look at the Los Angeles Coliseum before it was remodeled for
the 1932 Olympics), though since the game was filmed with silent-speed cameras
the action looks unnaturally fast when projected at sound speed. Still, the
junctures between stock and new footage to get Eddie and Biff into the big game
— need I tell you that they play poorly in the first half but rally in the
second and lead USC to a big come-from-behind upset once they overhear Babs and
her real boyfriend and realize she’s not worth fighting over because she
doesn’t love either of them? —
are artfully done, as indeed so is the entire movie, proof that a plot that was
clichéd even then could still be
made into a genuinely charming and entertaining film.
