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Post by Fading Fast on Aug 13, 2023 20:04:24 GMT
"Workers of the world unite."
In the original play, there clearly was a communist angle to all this.
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Post by Fading Fast on Aug 13, 2023 20:07:33 GMT
I promise that next week's "These Glamour Girls" and the following week's "Tea and Sympathy" are better movies.
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Post by topbilled on Aug 13, 2023 20:07:56 GMT
The Joyce Compton role definitely would have been assigned to Lana Turner if they had been made this a short time later after Turner started at the studio.
Several points during the movie, the focus shifted away from Ayres and O'Sullivan...so the comic support could take over. It's like they wanted it to be an ensemble picture, but couldn't really deviate from the two leads' love story.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Aug 13, 2023 20:08:45 GMT
Cute ending. It was fast and fun and nice to see all these actors when they were first starting out!
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Post by topbilled on Aug 13, 2023 20:10:25 GMT
I promise that next week's "These Glamour Girls" and the following week's "Tea and Sympathy" are better movies. |
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Post by topbilled on Aug 13, 2023 20:15:04 GMT
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Post by Fading Fast on Aug 14, 2023 4:02:34 GMT
I wrote these comments back in 2018 and just tweaked them a bit after yesterday's viewing.
Spring Madness from 1938 staring Maureen O'Sullivan, Lew Ayres, Ruth Hussey and Burgess Meredith
Back in the 1930s, MGM made several light-hearted college movies with (a brief aside) These Glamour Girls being a notable exception, as that movie is a dark look at the human frailty lurking just below the college hi-jinx of movies like Spring Madness.
We'll be screening These Glamour Girls for next week's "Sunday Live!"
Spring Madness, however, never rises above (nor digs below) its fun-and-formulaic approach to college romance.
Owing, though, to its talented cast, including Maureen O'Sullivan, Lew Ayres, Ruth Hussey and Burgess Meredith, Spring Madness is a better-than-average version of its wash-rinse-repeat plot.
Ayres and O'Sullivan fall in love, but there's an obstacle: Ayres doesn't want to get serious because he and his roommate Meredith plan to go to Russia after college "to study its economy" before joining the rat race. Good grief.
One assumes the censors were at work as not much more is made of the idiotic ideology behind the boy's idiotic plan, but it provides the all-important obstacle to Ayres' and O'Sullivan's relationship.
This hurdle drives the story as, in these movies, the goal of college, for most of the women, is to find a husband and, for most of the men, is to launch a career while avoiding getting "hooked."
These college movies' plots are often a simple "she wants to, but he doesn't want to get married" one. It is a plot that wouldn't change much until the Code started to fall in the 1960s.
Once you figure out the conflict, ten minutes should suffice for Spring Madness, you'll either enjoy the lighthearted look at college life in the '30s (it was a wealthy kids affair, not the democratic one of today) or you'll be bored.
If you're not bored, it's because of the female stars, more than anything else. Maureen O'Sullivan, as "the love interest," and still in the middle of her Tarzan movie stretch, looks ridiculously beautiful.
She also brings a toughness and vulnerability that has you rooting for her, despite your cynical side. Right next to her and adding to the "holy cow she's pretty" factor and the acting-talent factor is Ruth Hussey.
Hussey, as O'Sullivan's best friend, plays right to her personal acting brand portraying a pal who is smart and sarcastic, but with a good heart underneath her tough exterior.
These women keep this one engaging as the scenes without them are flat, despite a good effort by Lew Ayres and Burgess Meredith, playing Ayres' "wacky" friend "the Imp."
The picture also provides a fun peek at 1930s college life. Insanely elegant dorm rooms, house mothers protecting "their girls" and special college trains (seperating boys and girls, unsuccessfully) are all wonderful time travel.
Spring Madness is a better-than-average cookie-cutter Code-era college movie that is enjoyable mainly because of its likeable actors.
Please join us next Sunday for These Glamour Girls, a much-more-gutsy look at college life in the 1930s.
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