$1000 a Touchdown

In the early to mid-1930s, Joe E. Brown was a top comic working for Warner Brothers. But by the late 30s and into the 40s, the number of films he made and the quality diminished. I can only assume the public lost interest in his shtick...and I think it's because in so many of these earlier films, he played extremely egotistical characters...an odd way to garner sympathy for the guy and a quick way to get the public to tire of him. "$1000 a Touchdown" is one of his post-Warner films.

I must warn you that the copy I found on YouTube has absolutely horrid sound. It is watchable...but I advise you to turn on the auto-generated captions. They aren't good but they'll help you follow along a bit better.

Marlowe Mansfield Booth (Brown) inherits a college...something that I am pretty sure happens all the time. Like most colleges in movies of the 1930s, no one ever seems to go to class or get degrees...they're really just there to play football or cheer for the team. However, the school is having huge financial problems and unless the team starts to win, the place will close.

Like too many of Brown's films, this one is short on laughs. It even manages to make the least of supporting actor like Eric Blore, who is usually terrific. The only big plus is that it's a very early acting role for Susan Hayward and it's interesting to see her...though not enough to carry the story.

Martha Raye can't open her father's bankrupt college, so she hires Joe E. Brown to run it as a thearical school. Brown is the scion of a disinguished theatrical family. He's afflicted with stage fright, agoraphobia, and probably claustrophobia. When they run even further into debt, they decide the only way to save the place is to have their football team beat some other well-known football team.

Director James Hogan does what he can with this script, but given the two leads, they needed gag writers. Instead they got Delmar Daves, whose other writing credit that year was LOVE STORY. Brown gets to open his mouth wide a couple of times, and do the drunk act. Miss Raye gets to talk fast. With Eric Blore, Susan Hayward, Sid Saylor, Matt McHugh, and Don Wilson as the football commentator.

Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye were (separately) both known for their wide mouths, so I guess it was inevitable that someone would decide to team them on screen. Unfortunately, this movie isn't very funny. The cleverest thing about this movie is Joe E.'s character's name: he plays a ham actor christened Marlowe Mansfield Booth, which is the name of a 16th-century playwright and two 19th-century actor/managers.

Joe E. inherits a college (don'tcha hate it when that happens?). This is an American movie, so of course the 'college' is merely a front for a football team. (Classes? What classes?) Inevitably, everything Joe E. and Martha need to accomplish depends on their team winning the Big Game. Inevitably, Joe E. goes into the game at the last moment. So far, so good: Joe E. Brown was an extremely athletic man who often played inept weaklings on screen, and several of his films relied upon his character suddenly developing athletic prowess at the climax. Unfortunately, in this movie Joe's success is more down to dumb luck than anything else. The number on Joe's football jersey is 13 ... which tells you how obvious everything in this movie is.

I have mixed feelings about Martha Raye. I consistently find her unfunny, and I dislike the characters she played. In 'Monsieur Verdoux', I kept hoping that Chaplin's attempts to murder her would succeed, and I was annoyed that she survived at the end. However, in the real world, Martha Raye risked her life to perform for American servicemen in combat zones during several wars, and she was a tireless advocate on behalf of Vietnam veterans. In the last years of her life, Martha Raye hoped to get a film made based on her experiences performing in the USO during World War Two. Unfortunately, a certain well-known 'actress' ripped off the facts of Martha's life and made a flop movie that put paid to any chances of a straightforward Martha Raye biopic. So, I have a lot of sympathy for Martha Raye as a person even while I intensely dislike her as a performer.

And she's extremely unfunny in this movie. Several reliable character actors are in '$1,000 a Touchdown' - Eric Blore, Tom Dugan, Matt McHugh, Jimmy Conlin - but none of them have any decent material. All of them have been funny elsewhere, but none are funny in this movie. I was grateful for the presence of tall shapely brunette Joyce Mathews as a campus vamp. I'll rate '$1,000 a Touchdown' 2 points out of 10.