College

On graduation day, Ronald (Buster Keaton), the smartest member of his high school class, delivers a speech on "The Curse of Athletics," a talk that is met with derision or indifference by everyone but his loving mother (Florence Turner). After the speech, classmate Mary Haines (Ann Cornwall), the girl he loves, tells Ronald that she will never take an interest in him until he takes an interest in sports, and she leaves with Jeff Brown (Harold Goodwin), a dumb jock.

In the fall, Ronald, Mary, and Jeff all enroll at Clayton College. Obliged to work his way through school, Ronald gets a job as a soda jerk but is so inept that he quits before he is fired; his efforts to make the school baseball team go awry when he becomes the goat of a practice game; and he loses his next position, "colored waiter," when his fellow employees discover that he is a white boy in blackface.

After a disastrous tryout for the track team, Ronald is admonished by the dean (Snitz Edwards) for receiving poor grades. Ronald explains that his efforts to win Mary's affection through athletics have caused his scholastic record to suffer. A romantic soul, the dean orders the coach of the school's crew team (Carl Harbaugh) to make Ronald a coxswain and, thanks to the boy's unorthodox but ingenious coxing, the Clayton crew goes on to win the biggest race of the year.

Back in the locker room, Ronald receives a phone call from Mary, who is being held prisoner in her room by Jeff. Ronald sprints across campus to Mary's dorm, vaults through her window, and valiantly routs his rival. Immediately thereafter, the dean walks in, finds Ronald and Mary together, and expels them both. After rushing to the campus chapel to be married, the couple settle down, have children, bicker, grow old, and die.

Though less than a masterpiece, COLLEGE is a fine and funny film, for which its star later claimed most of the credit. "I practically did COLLEGE," he said, and leveled unflattering comments at director James W. Horne and screenwriter Carl Harbaugh (who appears in the movie in the role of the racing crew coach).

Keaton's campus klutz is less pitiable but somewhat more attractive than his opposite number in THE FRESHMAN. At one point in the latter movie, the title character actually weeps in self-pity (an outburst missing from some prints, probably due to second thoughts on Lloyd's part); Keaton's stone-faced collegian is not, of course, permitted tears any more than he is laughter. Despite the alluring alternative of a wonderful girl who loves him as he is, Lloyd's freshman aspires to athletic glory for no better reason than to become a campus big shot; Keaton's freshman risks ridicule and injury on the playing fields for a worthier reason: to attract the love of his life, a sports groupie. Harold does not learn that love is more important than popularity until the last reel; the wiser Ronald is privy to that verity from the start. Oddly enough, this flaw in Harold's character and value system makes him a more compelling figure than Ronald, and THE FRESHMAN a more resonant film than COLLEGE.

If somewhat less touching than the Lloyd movie, COLLEGE is no less funny. It's a treat to see Keaton, a superb athlete, pretending to be a poor one. Equally memorable are a very amusing Stepin Fetchit shuffle performed by Ronald in a desperate attempt to pass for black, and a scene in which Ronald, being tossed in a blanket by bullies, opens an umbrella in midair and is slowed down by camera overcranking shortly before grasping onto and consequently razing a small balcony, complete with a fat lady on it.

Though lacking the big outdoor set pieces of Keaton's major films (the locomotive chase in THE GENERAL, the cyclone in STEAMBOAT BILL JR., etc.), COLLEGE comes to a satisfying climax with the hero's rescue of his damsel in distress. In this sequence, Ronald successfully calls upon most of the athletic disciplines he has failed at previously: hurdling, pole-vaulting (reportedly the only time Keaton was ever doubled), discus throwing, batting, and sprinting. (The sight of Keaton running full out in several of his films is one of the silent cinema's most invigorating recurring images.)

After this sequence comes one of the weirdest (and briefest) codas in Hollywood history: a three-shot montage in which we see Ronald and Mary, not very happily married, procreate, grow old, and die within a mere 12 seconds of screen time. The implicit irony and bitterness of this epilogue clashes dramatically with the bright tone of the rest of the picture, but it all happens so fast that one is left not with a sour aftertaste but with a wry chuckle. (Violence.) leave a comment