Life Begins in College

I enjoyed this movie very much. Plenty of good humor if you're not overly woke. The drop dead gorgeous, Marjorie Weaver it's only in the movie at the 42 - 46 minute mark, and she has no lines!

A hilarious scene is actually the one with Marjorie Weaver. Here, the Ritz are bribing the college dean to keep the coach. A lot of good humor and song and dance. I laughed out loud several times while viewing.

42-year-old Nat Pendleton plays an Indian (with a wooden-Indian manner of speaking that disappears towards the end) who goes to college. Everyone dumps on him, save the Ritz Brothers, but when he starts winning football games for the college, everyone likes him.

It's a Ritz Brothers movie, their first feature with the names above the title. Their on-at-all-times stereo shtick comedy doesn't appeal to me, but director William Seiter deals effectively with my usual dislike by filling the movie with subplots common to college movies of the era: romance (Gloria Stuart plays the daughter of football coach Fred Stone and her rocky romance with pursuing Dick Baldwin), band music (Tony Martin sings a few songs) and, of course, football. Why there's even a brief scene in a classroom!

The best comedy performance is Joan Davis'. She plays a co-ed in hot pursuit of Nat Pendleton, and her barely-repressed craziness and timing are the most amusing thing in this rote movie.

The movie works all right as an average programmer. If you're fond of the Rotz Brothers, you'll enjoy their antics. Otherwise it averages as an amiable time-waster with several fine performers collecting a paycheck. And the Ritz Brothers, of course.

1937's "Life Begins in College" was the fifth feature film for the popular Ritz Brothers, but the first to offer them top billing, a shame since it must rank near the bottom of all their films. To modern viewers the story of a Jim Thorpe-type athlete of Native American heritage who becomes the star quarterback for the aging coach of Lombardy College (Fred Stone, Milburn's uncle) comes off as almost entirely humorless, weak material coupled with appalling musical numbers. Nat Pendleton does what he can as the Indian George Black, but it's an uphill battle from the start, crashing his motorcycle at top speed, being hazed by fraternity brothers, and finally joining up with campus tailors the Ritz Brothers, who have spent seven years in their shop before scoring their first customer. George turns out to be extremely wealthy, courtesy Oklahoma oil wells, and the Ritzes use his money to maintain the coach who was forced to resign, his daughter (Gloria Stuart) being romanced in dreadful fashion by the team's quarterback (Dick Baldwin), taking a seat on the bench when George proves the superior player. Later vehicles would offer the boys better opportunities than this turkey, for even the hugely talented Joan Davis is let down by her lone number, chasing after her Indian until he finally relents, to her chagrin. Small roles on the team for familiar faces like Elisha Cook and Robert Lowery, with Lon Chaney Jr. making a very brief appearance in the final moments as the bench warming Gilks, who can't get into the big game with the Ritz Brothers on the verge of losing. This appears to be the last time that Chaney adorned a football feature, after roles in "Girl O' My Dreams," "Hold 'Em Yale," "Accent on Youth," and "Rose Bowl." Those game highlights are the only spark to the entire film, a look back at the early days with the single wing offense, soon to be supplanted by the T-formation that earned the Chicago Bears a 73-0 championship rout of the Washington Redskins in 1940.

This just isn't a good movie. That Ritz Brothers' comedy is limited, best in their dance numbers and very weak in the dialogue passages. They can't carry a feature-length film on their own.

But there's nothing else here to carry it for them. The script is obvious and lame- brained, and the other performers can't do anything with it. (Who could?)

And then there's the blatant racism, mostly directed against Native Americans. It's sobering to remember that this movie was made by Fox Pictures, a fairly important studio, in 1937, the same year Fox released Shirley Temple's Heidi, and two years after it starred her in The Little Colonel with Black dancer Bill Robinson.

There really isn't anything to recommend this picture. The few mildly funny passages won't compensate for sitting through 80 minutes of tedium and embarrassing racism.

An eye-popping racist comedy based on the Jim Thorpe-like story of a Native American man on the football team of an Ivy League college, this film contains so many stereotypes not even white men are immune. It is some kind of redemption, I suppose, when every character is portrayed as an idiot; however, white folks are clearly seen as superior idiots. Super talented Joan Davis as the horny white gal who cannot keep her hands off the red man, takes the prize for most offensive song: "Big Chief Swing It" (or maybe the prize goes to "Our Team Is on the Warpath." The popular and influential Ritz Brothers star, and Tony Martin lends his golden tones to the antics, but nothing can redeem this insipid time piece. The only reason to watch it is as a lesson in American racism in the not-so-good old days.