Hold That Line

74/100. Exceptionally good Bowery Boys entry. A professor bets another professor that he can can make anyone a good student, and one professor insists that he gets to pick the person. Well, you guessed it, he picked some tough subjects, the boys themselves. This is sort of a distant twist of Pygmalion. Well, Ivy University has know idea what they are in for! Sach makes a mixture in chemistry that makes him very strong, and soon enough he is on the football team. The climax football game is quite similar to that of Harold Lloyd's The Freshman. Leo Gorcey does an exceptional job butchering the English language! Very funny, great pace and the boys are at their best.

In "A Chump at Oxford", Laurel & Hardy are both sent to Oxford by a beneficiary who does this to thank them for capturing some bank robbers. And, in "Trading Places" many decades later, two rich jerks take a man out of the gutter and make him over into a rich and successful stockbroker...just to see if clothes make the man! Both films are much like "Hold That Line" from the Bowery Boys.

The story begins at a rich gentlemen's club. Two of the members have made a bet. One insists that you could take a poor guy and place him in a top university and he'll be a success....the other disagrees. So they both go in search of a poor, undereducated soul to test the theory. In the process, they meet the Bowery Boys and decide to send all five to college!

At first, Sach nearly gets them thrown out of school when he accidentally creates dynamite in chemistry class. Later, Sach plays around with chemicals again...and he thinks he's created vitamis. Instead, he's made a formula that gives him phenomenal strength...and soon this boob is the star athlete of the school! And, when it comes to the big game, the film becomes a bit like "Horse Feathers"....when Chico and Harpo are kidnapped so they cannot play in (once again) the big football game!

As you may have noticed, there are quite a few story elements in "Hold That Line" that are very familiar. And, in a surprising twist, a newer film, "Trading Places", sure seems to be based, in part, on this Bowery Boys movie.

So is this any good? Yes, surprisingly so. While it's no classic, it had good momentum, a few laughs and kept my interest.

"Hold That Line" is not the best Bowery Boys movie. That doesn't mean it's a bad movie. It's just not as good as some of the others. This movie does have its fair share of laughs. But even at very short running time (67 mins), it feels a little long. "Hold That Line" is worth the watch. It's just more silly than it is funny.

Very funny Bowery Boys movie (twenty-fifth in the Monogram series) has the boys going to college! How can our favorite morons get into an ivy league school, you ask? Well, because two elderly alumni make a bet over whether the boys can succeed at their prestigious university. From there the movie goes a bit sideways and Sach takes a potion that makes him into a football star but, hey, it's still a better plot than most movies in the series. Huntz Hall gets the spotlight in this one, rubberfacing and acting like an idiot throughout. Lots of good slapstick with Huntz. Leo Gorcey is funny as ever, providing many great malapropisms, including a monologue in class that's quite a mouthful even for Leo. Bernard Gorcey is adorable as Louie the Sweet Shop owner (and, in a hilarious bit, as his mustachioed brother Morris). It's interesting to notice as the series wore on how much bigger his role got and how much more he brought to the table than most of the non-Slip or Sach Bowery Boys. David Gorcey and Bennie Bartlett are both around. Future sportscaster Gil Stratton joins the gang in this entry. He would only appear in two Bowery Boys films, including this one. He basically does nothing in the whole film. Veda Ann Borg, Gloria Winters, and Mona Knox provide the pretty. It's not my favorite Bowery Boys flick but it is a fun one. I can't imagine fans of the series not liking it.

Hold That Line (1952)

** (out of 4)

A couple rich snobs make a bet that they can take any group of idiots off the street, send them to Ivy school and make them smart. Slip (Leo Gorcey), Sach (Huntz Hall) and the boys are selected but their dumbness follows them to college but Sach ends up making some "vitamins" that allow him to become a huge football star. As you can tell by the story, this was TRADING PLACES thirty-one years earlier than that classic 1983 film but don't expect the same quality. Yet again we've given a fairly weak story and not too much is done with it. Once again we have a plot where the boys get mixed up with gangsters who eventually kidnap Sach so that they can place bets on a big game. Other stuff in the film includes the boys of course mixing it up with the star football player, dealing with various college exams and we even get to see some football action. The football scenes are all filmed rather poorly and nothing else really works here either. The entire film has a very cheap look to it and it's clear that Beaudine is on auto-pilot as the scenes never really add up to much and the entire thing just feels rushed. There's one saving grace in the film and that's a sequence where the boys get hazed and must go into their old neighborhood in drag. The scene inside Louie's diner is very funny and seeing Louie in drag was well worth sitting through the film. Gorcey once again takes a backseat as his character really doesn't have too much to do. Hull takes over the lead and manages to be OK here and thankfully his character isn't as big a dope as some of the previous films. I'm sure fans of the series will want to check this one out but those new will certainly want to start somewhere else.