West Point (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 21) my husband Charles and I watched the “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature on Turner Classic Movies, West Point (1927), directed by Edward Sedgwick (most known for his comedies, though he was brought in to “ghost-direct” the final chase scene for Lon Chaney, Sr.’s The Phantom of the Opera after original director Rupert Julian’s version fell flat with preview audiences) from a script by Raymond Schrock with titles by Joseph Farnham (cursed by several generations of film buffs as the man who chopped and channeled Erich von Stroheim’s Greed at producer Louis B. Mayer’s insistence). West Point was pretty obviously a follow-up to Tell It to the Marines (1926), which Charles and I had seen on last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase.” The stars were William Haines as obnoxious would-be cadet Brice Wayne (a character name a bit too close to Bruce Wayne for comfort, though this film was made a decade before the first Batman comic story) and Joan Crawford as Betty Channing, the young girl whose attentions Brice tries to gain by annoying the hell out of her. She’s got an alternate boyfriend who’s farther up the West Point hierarchy than Brice, Bob Sperry (Neil Neely), but Bob has been put “on furlough.” I’m not sure what that means but it does impose some strict restrictions on his ability to move around off campus. Brice shows up on the ferry to West Point with a miniature banjo which he uses to accompany himself in a set of loud, obnoxious and ribald songs. We get their lyrics as intertitles and when he was serenading Joan Crawford with some of these ditties, I was hoping she’d grab the banjo from him and bash him over the head with it. No such luck.

Indeed, Raymond Schrock’s biggest mistake in this film is he keeps Brice totally obnoxious for way too long, and we spend much of this movie wondering, “When the hell is the writer going to give him his comeuppance already?” That doesn’t happen until after Brice has become a football star for the Army team – he scores a lot of touchdowns but also acquires a reputation for arrogance – and he gives an interview to a reporter and denounces alleged “favoritism” on the part of his coach, Towers (Raymond G. Moses, a real-life Army major who was also on the film as a technical advisor). As a result, Brice is benched on the eve of the all-important Army-Navy game (represented by a lot of stock footage of the real one), and he loses his temper completely and says, “To hell with the Corps!” He’s overheard and brought up on charges by the cadets’ Honor Committee that could lead to his expulsion. Brice gets into an argument with his faithful roommate, “Tex” McNeil (William Bakewell) – given that we know the real William Haines was Gay, it’s hard to read their on-screen relationship as anything other than a lovers’ spat between a Gay couple. “Tex” tells him to apologize, Brice refuses, and Brice ends up shoving “Tex” against a wall, which eventually gives “Tex” a concussion. (It’s ironic indeed that the one young man in this movie who isn’t a football player is the one who gets the football-related injury.) “Tex” defends Brice before the Honor Committee and reveals that Brice secretly paid the $250 “entrance fee” for one of the cadets now leading the charge against him. He says that just before the effects of his concussion kick in and he ends up in the hospital for the rest of the movie. Brice writes a resignation letter and sends it to West Point’s superintendent (E. H. Calvert), but ultimately he talks the superintendent into refusing to accept it. Ultimately it ends the way you’d expect it to, with Brice sent in during the fourth quarter of the Army-Navy game and scoring the game-winning touchdown for Army (an obvious ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, made two years earlier and a much better film!). The game’s outcome redeems him with his fellow cadets and the film flashes forward three years to Brice’s graduation ceremony and his final pairing with Betty at the end.

Though William Haines is basically playing the same character he did in Tell It to the Marines and most of his other movies – the obnoxious college kid who matures – Tell It to the Marines was a much better movie, mainly because of Lon Chaney’s presence as the authority figure. For its first half West Point is more a comedy than anything else – no wonder they assigned comedy specialist Edward Sedgwick to direct! – but for the second half it’s a soap opera, and a dull, uninteresting soap opera at that. Schrock isn’t as good a writer as Richard Schayer was on Tell It to the Marines in creating enough sympathy for William Haines’s character that we root for him in spite of his surface obnoxiousness. Haines’s career trailed off in the mid-1930’s; he made it through the transition to sound O.K. but he worried that he was aging out of college-boy roles and wasn’t getting the kinds of parts he wanted to prove he could do other things. In 1934, with the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency breathing down the necks of the major studios and demanding that Hollywood “clean up” its act, MGM head Louis B. Mayer told his biggest Gay male stars, Haines and Ramon Novarro, that they would have to marry women or he would fire them. Both refused; Novarro went back to his native Mexico and made movies there, while Haines did three films for the Mascot studio (which later became Republic) and then shifted careers and became a well-regarded interior designer. He was launched in that career change by Joan Crawford – who once called Haines and his partner, Jimmie Shields, the happiest married couple she knew. Crawford hired Haines to redecorate her house, invited the picture magazines to photograph it, and sang Haines’s praises in the accompanying interviews.