We Went to College

WE WENT TO COLLEGE is a surprisingly racy post-code movie about a middle-aged crowd letting their hair down on alumni weekend at their old college. Hugh Herbert is now an underpaid professor while Walter Abel is a prosperous brick seller with old pal Charles Butterworth as his disoriented assistant. Butterworth persuades the all-business Abel to attend the reunion which Abel finally agrees to only when he learns he may be in the running for a contract to build a new building at the college. Abel's wife Edith Atwater tags along, agreeing that her husband needs to let his hair down and loosen up. Edith is amused to learn Herbert's wife Una Merkel is Abel's old flame and she playfully encourages the duo to get reacquainted. Alas, the booze starts flowing in time and Walter becomes QUITE uninhibited - and Una is more than ready to chuck her marriage and reignite the old flame.

This comedy is quite good with an excellent cast. Charles Butterworth is curiously top-billed (he was under contract to MGM at the time which may explain that) but his is perhaps the fifth role in the story. Una Merkel is delightful as the long-suffering professor's wife who suddenly sees a chance to recapture her youth while Walter Abel is equally fine as the businessman who finally learns to kick off his shoes (trouble is he may not stop there!). Starlet Edith Atwater does well in one of her very few movies as a young lead (she later came back as a character player) while Hugh Herbert, usually one of the more irritating character players of the era, is surprisingly sympathetic and has a more traditional role than normal for him. The movie is vague about just how long ago the quartet graduated from college (the actors' ages are all over the place with Herbert born in the 1880's while Una, his wife and college mate, born in 1903!) but after a somewhat slow start moves quickly and is an above-average comedy for the "second feature" it no doubt was.

Sociologically this movie is interesting: At the time it came out, college was less common for people than it's now become. Though the characters are ostensibly engaged in their alumni homecoming event, it's a silly event. Maybe college was like that in the thirties but it sure wasn't when I went in the seventies.

The cast boasts some big names. They're mostly second- or third-leads -- father or uncle types. They do OK, though Walter Abel, as one of the two central characters, seems annoyed throughout. More annoyed, I'd say, than his character is meant to be.

In its favor, it has a chamber music performance. It has Shakespeare, too. I couldn't quite make this out but I think a scene for Othello had the Moor played in black-face: Not just darkened skin but real minstrel show regalia. If so, that is unfortunate and if I am mistaken, my apologies to all.

Either way, from it's dopey opening credits, I can't think of any real reason to see this.

This mild little comedy of how Walter Abel goes to his college homecoming in order to secure a contract for his company might have made a nifty little movie a few years earlier, especially as Una Merkel appears in it and few were better in sexy pre-code comedies than she. But, alas, the enforcement of the Code was embraced enthusiastically by Metro, and this comes through as contrived and a little desperate.

Some amusement is added by a trio of good lead comics doing their shticks: Charles Butterworth does his blank-faced moron and has the most amusing lines; Hugh Herbert plays his amiable ditherer to usual good effect; and most of Walter Catlett's role seems to have wound up on the cutting room floor. Joseph Santley's direction is, as always, competent but unable to produce anything surprising and the other behind-the-camera talent is from Metro's B company. Not really worth your time.

Star-wise, I gave this four for what it was overall, subtracted one for Hugh Herbert, whom I find annoying and unnecessary, added two-and-a-half back for Una Merkel, who is mostly charming and funny here and lays on her cute Southern accent thicker than usual, then threw on another half star for some odd little dialogue touches that caught me off guard and made me laugh, probably mostly thanks to Maurice Rapf, that Dartmouth boy and cinematic intellectual. There are some nice '30s MGM settings: rustic cabin, lake in the moonlight. But mostly the only reason to look at this at all is for Una, who is fluttery and cute and sometimes even sexy, as in the love scene on the porch when her hair's all wet and tangled. I recorded it off TCM and fast-forwarded through parts of it, especially Hugh Herbert.