User Reviews

Richard Cromwell goes to college to get a lot of knowledge and become a doctor. When it turns out he's a great broken-field runner, football coach Douglass Dumbrille grooms him as next season's secret weapon. When he is unleashed, Cromwell is terrific, and gains national fame. Along the way he falls innocently in love with Dorothy Jordan, is schooled in the economics of college football by Leon Ames, and the unprofitable fleetness of fame by Ward Bond. There's also John Wayne as the entire Harvard football team, stunt casting of the 1931 USC Trojans -- they had won the championship that year -- plus Mae Marsh as Cromwell's mother and and an Robert Warwick as Miss Jordan's father, just to hammer the points home.

The copy of the movie I looked at last night on TCM was not in prime condition. That's a pity for any movie shot by Joseph August. Yet I could still see the appearance of the "Hero Portrait" lighting and shooting angle, not on the football field, but elsewhere, emphasizing the point that hero worship is a pose.

This movie takes a hard and cynical look at the big business of college football, and doesn't pull its punches, even as director Roy William Neill makes sure that all the plot points of juvenile romance, and thrills of college football are covered. In an era when college movies were about fun, games, and sexy co-eds, this dark example stands out from the crowd.

This is really not a review, just a note that, amazingly, the third or fourth major role in this movie, and arguably the one that gets the best performance, is that of the heroine's father, but the actor is not listed in these credits. He is, of course, Robert Warwick, who had a long career and was still appearing on TV dramas in the early 1960s, when past 80. This is actually one of his best performances on film. It might also be noted that although it seemed a very long time before he was recognized as the excellent actor he was (mainly through John Ford) and was often playing little more than walk-ons all through the 1930s, Ward Bond, here seen at 29, is excellent in a single-but-telling scene as semi-washed up ex-football player who puts the Richard Cromwell character on to the way his college and football team are using him to feather their own nests while he gets nothing out of it. (Cromwell was limited, perhaps because of his ever-boyish looks, but gives a very credible performance here.) But one does wonder why it took until the late 1940s before Bond received recognition for the fine character actor he was and always had been.

The other review appearing here is very misleading, as John Wayne does not play a sportsman, but an athlete, in this film, has no lines that I could hear, and is simply in a few football scenes, none of them calling any kind of attention to him. If he wasn't identified in the credits, you wouldn't even know he'd been in it, ditto Buster Crabbe.