The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: So This is College

  • So This Is College

    Synopsis

    It is registration day at the University of Southern California and best friends Biff and Eddie are reunited after the vacation. Both have many girlfriends, but they agree to “cut out the women” until the football season is over.

    Biff (Robert Montgomery) and Eddie (Elliott Nugent) getting ready to “cut out women”

    Immediately afterwards, they each meet Babs Baxter, a new co-ed. Eddie says he will see her at 8, but Babs’s preference is for Biff, with whom she makes a date.

    Back at their fraternity house [College Days], Eddie and Biff both announce that they have met a new girl. At dinner, Biff is offended by Eddie’s intention of sharing his new girl, even though that is what they always do [Until the End].

    That evening, at Babs’s sorority house [I Don’t Want Your Kisses If I Can’t Have Your Love], Eddie and Biff discover they are interested in the same girl. A number of other young men turn up and Babs asks the other girls in the house to help her out, stipulating that Biff is hers [Campus Capers].

    Eddie and Biff continue to argue over Babs during an entomology field trip. Babs tricks Eddie into leaving them, then tricks Biff into giving her his fraternity pin.

    Babs (Sally Starr) about to get her hands on Biff’s fraternity pin

    The boys race caterpillars to decide who will accompany Babs to the Glee Club Hop. Biff wins, though by cheating. On the night of the Hop, Biff sends Eddie’s dress trousers to the cleaners so he won’t be able to go. [Sophomore Prom]. Eddie gets there by stealing a freshman’s trousers, then inserts his name into Babs’s dance card.

    Biff comes close to telling Babs he loves her. Eddie and Biff continue to compete for Babs during a tag dance [The Farmer in the Dell].

    Back at their room, Biff tells Eddie that he is serious about Babs and plans to ask her to marry him after college. Eddie agrees to back off, but then realises that he also loves Babs.

    Some time later, Babs gets Eddie to go for a drive and asks why he has been avoiding her. Eddie kisses her and she kisses him back. Biff sees Eddie and Babs arriving back very late and kissing. Eddie wants to tell Biff what has happened, but Biff pretends to be asleep.

    The following evening, on the eve of the Big Game, Eddie gives Babs his fraternity pin and Biff punches him. Babs attends the game with Bruce Nolan, and is wearing an engagement ring. When the game starts, Eddie and Biff both play badly and USC is trailing at half-time. The coach threatens to substitute them if they do not improve.

    Eddie and Biff overhear Babs telling Bruce that they both mean nothing to her. Back on the field, their play improves and USC gains ground, but Eddie is injured.  Biff wins the game with a kick in the dying seconds of the game.  Later, Eddie and Biff promise never to let a girl come between them again–and then they see a beautiful girl….

  • Jesse Greer

    Jesse Greer (1896-1970) published over 100 songs, but perhaps only ‘Just You, Just Me,’ written with Ray Klages for Marianne, and reprised years later in This Could Be the Night, has become a standard.

    Greer and Klages also wrote a number featured in So This is College.

  • Ray Klages

    Raymond Klages (1888-1947) and his composer-partner Jesse Greer are perhaps the least-known of the three songwriting partnerships that contributed to Marianne, but it is their song ‘Just You, Just Me’ that went on to become a jazz standard that has been recorded by dozens of artists. It was used again by Metro almost thirty years later in This Could Be the Night.

    Klages and Greer’s only other work for the studio was a song in So This is College.

  • Cliff Edwards

    The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who introduced ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to the world. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.

    Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.

    Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.

    His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon. 

    Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.

    The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West. 

    At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was. 

  • Irving Thalberg

    The Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg (1899-1937) was the creative engine room of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the studio’s creation in 1925 until his early death. In twelve years he supervised over 400 pictures, including virtually all of its prestige productions, without ever choosing to take an on-screen credit. 

    Thalberg had some level of involvement with most of MGM’s musical output from The Broadway Melody in 1929 until A Day at the Races, on which he was working at the time of his death; it was he who brought the Marx Brothers to Metro, reviving their flagging careers at the cost of comedic purity.

    Thalberg effectively launched the musical genre as the driving force behind The Broadway Melody. He showed his inclination for experimentation-within-limits by okaying Hallelujah even though King Vidor warned him it would make no money.

    Thalberg brought Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbet from the Metropolitan Opera and gifted stardom to Jeanette MacDonald. He persuaded Luise Rainer to take the small role in The Great Ziegfeld that won her an Oscar.

    Although business-oriented, Thalberg was prepared to devote time and money to producing high-quality work, and he made profits as a result. His impact on the early development of the MGM musical is impossible to quantify, but a philosophy of excellence can certainly be seen in the work that followed, especially in the golden age of the early 1950s.

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