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The issue is bluntly stated, "a college is like a business" and like a business it relies on funds regardless of principles. The football trainer hired by the failing university (Pat O'Brien) is described as "an unscrupulous, high-pressure showman," he doesn't quite disagree, "I wouldn't make a bad general." His strategy is to bring in mercenary muscleheads and urge the occasional unnecessary roughness, the palookas (among them Nat Pendleton, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Joe Sawyer) are dutifully assigned academic interests ("I can't spell what I'm majoring in"). The only one interested in studies is the team captain (Dick Powell), who locks horns with the touchdown hog (Lyle Talbot) in a tussle shot below the waist as two figures slamming across a dorm room. On the sidelines is the coach's neglected wife (Ann Dvorak), gradually warming to the jock's advances. "Boy, how'd you like to stick your finger in her coffee?" William Wellman on "tramp athletes" and their venal puppeteers, a serious exposé made almost entirely of gags. Not above fixing for passing grades or dabbling in real-estate fraud, the peanut-munching protagonist pursues victory with a ruthless drive that at one point causes a rival fullback's death. (The missus is less bothered by his tactics than by his lack of attention.) Rewarded by a blithely corrupt system, he's Napoleon in his own mind: "Yeah, but he lost out in his big game, didn't he?" "Nah, he got crossed up in his signals." The stadium showcases the racket to thunderous applause, "it may not be sportsmanship, but it is football." One road leads to Bacon's Knute Rockne All American, another to Tourneur's Easy Living, and the road to hell leads to Stone's Any Given Sunday. With Hugh Herbert, Arthur Byron, Arthur Hohl, Charles C. Wilson, Phillip Reed, Donald Meek, Berton Churchill, and Herman Bing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |