#005: So This is College
SO THIS IS COLLEGE
Release Date
November 8, 1929
History
So This is College is MGM's first college musical film, and would become a predecessor to films such as Good News. College culture was at a crux when this film was released. According to the US Census, in 1910, 37,200 bachelor degrees were awarded in the country. In 1930, by comparison, this number had more than tripled to 122,500 degrees. After the Great Depression hit in 1929, while the numbers would still continue to increase over the years, colleges faced great challenges in staying open with factors such as the economic situations for potential attendees and their families and the unavailability of grant money that previously kept higher education institutions running. So This is College doesn't address any of these issues specifically as production started in March 1929, months before Black Thursday (October 24th) crashed the stock market. The film was released a few weeks after the crash, on November 8th, so there would have not been much of an impact on college culture being affected by the crash at the time of release.
So This is College was filmed at MGM in Culver City, with portions shot at the University of Southern-California. The characters are attending a fictional version simply entitled "Southern California" with a modified school logo on their clothes. Not only are characters filmed outdoors on USC's campus, but for the climactic football game finale, MGM intercut real footage from a USC football game at the USC Coliseum to be used as b-roll while closeups of characters were interspersed. More on that later.
The film features actor Elliot Nugent, who had done some silent film work four years earlier before hitting it big in 1929, with this and another non-musical role in Wise Girls. He would go on to have a bigger career as a director than as an actor in Hollywood. Another actor turned director that plays the second male lead in the film is Robert Montgomery, best remembered today for his role as actor and director in Lady in the Lake. Sally Starr is the lead female who creates the love triangle between Nugent and Montgomery for a college romp about being torn between friendship and love, and "Ukele Ike" Cliff Edwards returns to this musical, rounding out the cast. As with the other films of this time, there was also a silent version produced for theaters not equipped with sound.
Review
This film was endearing, with a simple plot. Biff (Robert Montgomery) and Eddie (Elliot Nugent) are best friends. They have been fraternity house roommates for three years and are starting their senior year as roommates one final time. They are also the top players on the college football team. They both fall in love with Babs (Sally Starr). They compete for her attention, play pranks on each other to steal her away, and then things take a more serious turn and their friendship is soon in jeopardy over it.
These characters have an interesting dynamic. Eddie and Biff are weirdly close. When they reunite at the beginning of the film, their bromance suffers from a weird codependency. In fact, when Eddie finds out that Biff has a new girlfriend and threatens to "put the works on her" before he's even met her, Biff gets very sore. Of course, they sing their fraternity song with the rest of the group and make up in 20 seconds. They admit that competing for girls has been a recurring theme of their friendship. Babs changes all of this. Eddie falls so hard for her, that he's willing to steal the candy Biff's bought for her (not knowing it was for her of course) in order to give it to her himself as a present. Clearly, while Eddie claims he and and Biff are best friends, Eddie has no problem stealing from him. Eddie also finds this situation of the love triangle more amusing than Biff, at first. Not only do Biff and Eddie both come to the house to court her, but so do the rest of the guys at the house. Eddie finds this situation funny, but Biff is very hostile toward the situation, already having felt that Babs should be solely with him.
The competition between the three starts out as fun at first and then begins to escalate. There is a caterpillar race (where Biff and Eddie find two caterpillars and see which one can get to the finish line first) to see who can take Babs to the school dance. Biff wins, but Eddie tries to have one of the freshmen take Biff's pants to get pressed the night of the dance so Biff can't go. Biff overhears and swaps the pants for Eddie's, and as a result, Eddie can't go to the dance either. Biff has his name on all of Babs' dances on her dance card, but Eddie swipes it from the back window and adds his name to every other dance (stealing a freshman's pants and entering the venue). As the pranks get more intense, Eddie starts to get a little more heated at how this has changed Biff into playing dirty, more than his affection for Babs. In fact, when Biff tells Eddie that this he has more serious intentions with Babs than other girls he and Eddie have competed for, Eddie bows out.
It's hard to know where Babs stands on this. When the guys all come to court her, she tells her roommates that she wants them to help get rid of the guys for her so she can be alone with Biff, giving the impression that she is really mostly devoted to him. She even pushes off advances from Eddie when he first courts her with candy and a song on the piano, "I Don't Want Your Kisses". She is rather fond of Eddie's clowning, though, as serious as she is about Biff. She loves the attention she gets from the competition between the two. There's a sketchy quality to the Babs character that starts to appear when the competition between Biff and Eddie begins. For example, she purposely loses her belt pin, which pressures Biff into giving her his fraternity pin. Giving a girl your fraternity pin was a commitment of going steady for much of the early to mid 20th Century. Still, she pays more attention to Eddie than Biff after the dance, with the two of them laughing on the walk home and pantomiming a Romeo and Juliet type scene. Babs assures Biff repeatedly that she's devoted to him despite flirting with Eddie. Still, she signals to her roommate who walks by them to help her out when Biff is getting too intense about the future of their relationship.
When Eddie bows out, but still clearly has feelings for Babs, he gives her the cold shoulder. It's clear that Babs loves the attention more than her gentleman callers, because she does everything in her power to take Eddie hostage for the day. She's a manipulative character, clearly the villain in this film. She reels Eddie in, by calling him "scared" of getting in her car when he refuses. When he rebels against this thought and does get into the car, he still discards her advances to kiss her, so she in turn says he's "too young" which he resents and kisses her to show her this isn't the case. This leads to a night of fun between them, and a funny scene of Eddie helping her into her dormitory after curfew. It's clear that the two of them would have been a better couple, as they are having way more fun together than she ever did with Biff.
This feud between Biff and Eddie over their girl not just breaks them up as roommates, but affects their ability to perform in their favorite past time-- football! And as a result of their feud, the team plays terribly for the first half of the big game near the end of the movie. Little do Biff and Eddie know that Babs has come to the game with another guy named Bruce, who she says she's missed (giving us the impression that he's been in the picture long before her games with Biff and Eddie). After the coach yells at Biff and Eddie to get back in the game, they see Babs removing both Biff and Eddie's pins for Bruce and telling him that Biff and Eddie meant nothing to her. Biff and Eddie realize how silly this feud was, and they join forces to win the football game. Once again.....who is the real couple in this film? The epilogue shows them saying they'll never let a girl break them up again, and the last minute of the film shows another girl coming between them comically as the end titles come up.
What I really took out of this movie was the contemporary portrayal of a college. Some moments were really universal to me. For example, at the beginning of the film, there is a water balloon fight, which we still see on campuses today. There is a shot at the beginning where Eddie and Biff are so excited to see each other that they embrace. It mirrors the timeless camaraderie of college friends seen in films like St. Elmo's Fire in 1985 and Neighbors in 2014. Later in the film, one of the minor characters sneaks his friend into the game with his raincoat. It made me think of how, still to this day, college kids will try to cheat the system by sneaking into movies, concerts, bars, etc. Early on in the film, Eddie pretends to be talking to a girl on the phone when it is really a tailor he owes money to. Lying about one's love life is something that all college students have either done or witnessed for decades. Most timeless, though, is the theme of jealousy and a girl or guy breaking up a friendship. 100 years later, I know that this film would resonate with college students today because of that theme. Biff moves out of his room with Eddie over this feud-- a common situation for a lot of roommates today.
From a historical perspective, this film is a great look at a 1929 college. The little details make this film worth viewing. Some of the hazing rituals, such as having freshmen pull a trunk up and down a staircase while the upperclassmen are blocking them at the beginning of the film, having them kiss a lucky shoe, showing them getting paddled, having them clean up after the upperclassmen, or even when Eddie for all practical reasons sexually assaults them in the bushes so he can have their pants, is very cringeworthy. But there are many other great moments worth celebrating from a 1929 historical look at college life.
There is an old fashioned pep rally, with a huge bonfire that's about 10 feet high. Biff practices the latest dance moves in a couple of scenes in the film. A number called "Campus Capers" illustrates the many dances in the 1920s, which today is a decade we only remember "The Charleston" for. Speaking of dances, we also get to see what a formal college dance looked like in 1929, with dance cards, as mentioned before, and the concept of a "tag dance", where if a gentleman is tapped on the shoulder, someone can cut in. For the sake of this movie of course, it's a constant tagging back and forth between Biff and Eddie. The caterpillar race takes place during an entomology class field trip. Entomology was in its peak as a subject of college study at the time.
Starr's performance as Babs is an absolute disaster at times. She can't dance or sing, and her line delivery is forces. On the contrary, in scenes where it seems like she's improvising along with the action, such as the charming scene where Biff and Eddie decide to have a caterpillar race to win her affection, she has a natural reaction because she's unintentionally forgotten to keep acting in the scene, and this makes her performance work. There is another scene much later in the film where Babs and Eddie are sneaking over a tower after missing curfew at the end of a date in her car. The scene was very cute, where the two of them are having a fun time trying to get her over the wall and not get caught. It seemed quite improvised and showed how Starr could do a better job in her performance when she wasn't trying so hard as she did in most of the picture. The two male leads definitely carry this picture with their performances, and I would say this film seemed more natural than the other films discussed so far in this blog, where characters felt more comfortable with the presence of microphones and didn't feel the need to slowly yell their lines into them for the whole movie.
Still, that doesn't mean that the technology was developed enough for actors to not project their lines at all times yet. Most of the time, the audio is good enough where the actors are heard without overcompensating, but in at least two instances of outdoor scenes shot during the day, it is hard to hear their lines. The first appears when Eddie meets Babs and tries to woo her. Beyond the poor placement of microphones not picking up their dialogue, there is an issue with the traffic noise that the microphones picked up. Because there is parallel editing between the two characters separately and shots of them together, there is a jarring quality to the sound of traffic and crowd. Multilayered recording of effects was clearly not a mastered technique yet and it shows, with a shot of Eddie having heavy traffic sound, and a cut to Babs having nearly no traffic sound, followed by a shot of Eddie again with the heavy traffic, even though these characters are only supposed to be standing a few feet apart. Later in the film, when Babs follows Eddie with her car as he tries to ignores her, the dialogue is hard to understand due to the placement of the microphones in the street setting. Rerecording this dialogue would have been a better idea to keep the audience engaged.
The audio isn't the only technical issue I had with the film. There is not a lot of artistic merit to the film. For example, there is a lack of closeups, I can't recall remembering any at all in the film. Most of the film is medium shots of the characters. In fact, with the exception of the caterpillars on the log, I can't recall there being anything of artistic merit when it came to the cinematography. Editing the USC game into the film and cutting to the characters could have worked if the footage had matched the quality of the rest of the film. The problem is the footage was shot with a hand crank camera, and runs at a faster rate than the rest of the film, so cutting it in made it look silly and out of place. There's also a lot of repeating of shots. For example, during the dance scene, there is a recurring joke where a pant-less character is in need of a pair of slacks to go back into the dance, so he grabs a character and wrestles him behind a bush to steal the pants. In return, that character does it to someone else. In the three instances that it happens though, the same shot of a bush shaking to indicate the wrestling is used. During the football game at the end, the status of the game comes through a live announcer at the game. There were so many ways the filmmakers could have done this, but they kept cutting to the same still shot of a megaphone repeatedly, which became tiresome after the third time.
There are some minor characters that work well, such as the freshmen that are hazing at the fraternity. There are some that work not so well too, such as the cook at the beginning of the film who starts crying because she feels the boys at the fraternity house are being mean to her. We don't see her again until the end of the film when she comically is throwing food around the kitchen while enthusiastically listening to the game. This also applies to the tailor and his wife, who are introduced at the beginning when Eddie is on the phone with them and pretending to be on the phone with a girlfriend. They reappear for some comic relief at the end of the film, but because we are not that familiar with who these characters are and they are reintroduced so late in the game, they fall flat.
Musical numbers work quite well, on the other hand. While I felt "Ukulele Ike" Cliff Edwards was a little too old for this part, he does a fun simple number at the beginning of the film called "College Days". The "hit parade" number of the film is a song entitled "I Don't Want Your Kisses If I Can't Have Your Love" which is sung repeatedly by the two lead men, but the main version is by Eddie to Babs on a piano. While Montgomery makes some weird fish lips while he sings the song, it is still cute. The big dance number in the film, "College Capers" comes right after this, which I think was my favorite number in the film.
I found this film enjoyable even if it did have some issues that needed to be worked out. I feel as though it's a good benchmark to see how much MGM had achieved in the production quality of their musical films in only 9 months after Broadway Melody was released. I'm still looking forward to the day when these films get a little less rudimentary.
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