Campus life was a popular subject for 1920s Broadway musical comedies, with DeSylva, Brown and Henderson’s 1927 Good News perhaps the pick of the crop. Good News was itself filmed twice by MGM–in 1930 and 1947–but it also inspired college-based musicals across a range of studios in 1929: Words and Music (Fox), Howdy Broadway (Rayart), Sweetie (Paramount), The Forward Pass (First National) and Sunny Skies (Tiffany).
Metro’s contribution to the cycle was So This Is College, which it used to showcase three screen newcomers whose names would have meant little to film fans. The names of two of them–Elliott Nugent and Sally Starr–remained fairly obscure, but Robert Montgomery went on to greater things as an actor and director.
The Broadway Melody and Marianne had both cast actors with good singing voices opposite less vocally-gifted female leads. In So T his I s College, however, neither Montgomery nor Nugent have particularly strong voices. The former gets out a few lines of ‘I Don’t Want Your Kisses If I Can’t Have Your Love’ and rewritten lyrics to ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ and leaves it at that. Nugent ostensibly has a solo number (‘I Don’t Want Your Kisses If I Can’t Have Your Love’), but it looks very much as though he is miming to someone else’s singing; when he speaks lines in his natural voice, there is a definite mismatch. For her part, Sally Starr gamely speaks her way through ‘Campus Capers’ to Cliff Edwards’s scat accompaniment. Edwards is the only performer to make any serious attempt at singing, and has three numbers.
Eddie (Elliott Nugent), Babs (Sally Starr) and Biff (Robert Montgomery) on an entomology field trip
The songs in So This Is College are more or less integrated with the plot. ‘I Don’t Want Your Kisses If I Can’t Have Your Love’ is a love song performed in a domestic setting and with no performative justification.
In the chorus sung ‘Until the End,’ Biff and Eddie are forced to extol the virtues of friendship while exhibiting hostility toward one another, an early use of a song to satirize a plot development.
Eddie and Biff, friends until the end
Sam Wood’s direction is fairly anonymous, and much of the last twenty minutes is intercut with footage from a real University of Southern California football game. Biff and Eddie both lose the girl (to an uncredited Joel McCrea), but regain their friendship and win the match. Sis boom bah.
If the MGM musical has any cultural cachet today, it is usually attached to a handful of Hollywood stars–Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly–or a similarly small number of iconic films: Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris (1951), perhaps Meet Me in St Louis (1944).
But ‘the MGM musical’ actually encompasses 215 individual pictures, mostly produced at MGM’s Culver City studio between 1929 and 1972. Many of these films are now forgotten, even by committed film buffs.
Montana Moon (1930) is no Meet Me in St Louis and Malcolm St Clair was certainly no Vincente Minnelli, yet it is an important film for at least two reasons. Its location footage challenges the misconception that On the Town (1949) was the first musical to include footage shot outside the studio. And, like all the other films discussed here, it contributed to the evolution of MGM’s unique style of musical; Singin’ in the Rain did not spring unheralded from Gene Kelly’s muscular loins.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer entered the world of feature-length musicals first and to great effect: The Broadway Melody (1929) pushed across the edges of what was believed achievable with the new talking pictures and won the Oscar for best picture for its trouble.
