Hold 'Em Yale

Rod La Rocque is a wealthy Argentinian who gets into Yale. On arrival, he immediately falls in love with Jeanette Loff, and finds himself pursued by dumb cop Tom Kennedy. After a number of gag sequences involving hazing, he finds that Miss Loff won't look at him until he wins his letter, so he tries boxing, and finally football. This winds up with him kept out of the big game against Harvard because he's in hospital with a broken shoulder.

In other words, it's a standard college movie of the era, with a couple of extra points because La Rocque and his valet, Jerry Mandy, have their title cards in mildly fractured English. Some of the sequences are quite amusing, and Kennedy, playing the same sort of dumb cop he would for the next couple of decades, is quite good.

During the principal photography of this film, DeMille was famous for firing a crew member who dropped an appliance during a shoot.

'Who was that?' DeMille shouted. 'It just fell out', the crew member replied. 'You can just fall out, you're through', DeMille said. That was far more interesting than the film itself.

Brisk undemanding college comedy. La Roque leaves the gauchos in his native Argentina and goes to Yale, where he never has the occasion to crack a book.

To win miss Loft and avoid comic cop Kennedy, he shaves his mustache and joins the team where, of course, he becomes the star player.

This one survives in a nice sharp copy which would be better tinted. It's another of those De Mille program movies, which made up the highlights of the old Kodascope library. La Roque is in his element and the production values are slick, without hinting the heights the technicians will reach in years to come.