It’s high school graduation and Ronald is late. He hurries along to the ceremony through the rain with his adoring mother in tow. His tardiness means he must take the only seat available, next to the radiator. When the time comes for his speech, the steam from the heater has shrunk his rain-soaked suit to button-bursting proportions.
As for the speech, Ronald regales the audience with his views on the virtue of scholarship and the evils of athletic pursuits. By the time he is done, his mother is the only one left sitting in the hall.
That’s not to say no one in the audience was paying attention. Ronald’s crush Mary sets upon him immediately after he leaves the building. She thinks a girl would be crazy to choose a bookworm over a football stud, and will have nothing more to do with him. Off she goes with hunky Jeff, whose smug demeanor means we will hate him immediately.
Ronald resolves to follow Mary to Clayton College and prove his athletic prowess. He arrives with a suitcase full of sports how-to books and equipment from a hodgepodge of different equipment, from football pads to baseball gear. The dean is thrilled to have a scholar on campus to demonstrate the superiority of more intelligent pursuits, but Ronald has other ideas.
He tries his hand at a number of sports, showing his level of incompetence along the way. He tries out for baseball and demonstrates an inability to do anything. He tries track and field and can barely throw the javelin five feet and almost kills half his team with the hammer throw. By the time he is attempting to pole vault and the stick cracks in half, we know he is never going to get his act together.
Or is he? The dean forces the rowing team to take him on as coxswain for their big race. Meanwhile, the recently expelled Jeff has locked himself in Mary’s room, knowing if he is discovered with her, she will be expelled too (and hopefully marry him?). Can Ronald lead his crew to victory? And can he save Mary from Jeff’s bizarrely conceived marriage proposal?
College is barely a film.
It’s more a series of skits starring Keaton trying and failing at any number of things. Some of the bits work. I like the opening speech. I like the track tryouts. And the final dash to save Mary is madcap and brilliant.
I did not love any of the set pieces though. There’s nothing here as good as a moment of The Seven Chances or even The General.
Perhaps the biggest in-joke of the movie is simply the idea that Keaton could be unathletic. You buy him for a while as the weak, bookish guy, but eventually he has to put on that track uniform and you see his physique and you just know he can’t sell this anymore.
Even as he fails at each event, he is never unathletic. When he throws the javelin it arcs high out of the camera’s range before plopping pitifully a few feet away. He takes every hurdle, touching each one just enough to knock it over while never breaking stride. He has little trouble picking up the hammer toss; his mistake is simply that he whirls around and around, threatening anyone in range. He’s not weak. He’s just not great at sports.
There’s a subplot where Ronald needs to earn money for college and takes a couple of jobs as a soda jerk and in a restaurant. Neither are funny, particularly the restaurant sequence where we see Keaton in black face. Ugh.
The supporting cast is generic with one exception: Snitz Edwards. Every time he walks on screen, I smile. He has very little screen time here, but he mines every moment.
The final coda of the film is absurd in its humor. Ronald has won the girl and in less than 15 seconds we see them married, then with children, then elderly, then… their gravestones. It’s a great idea for an ending, but feels unearned here. There’s a cynical humor to the series of shots that would land perfectly had anyone bothered to convey that we should care about Mary and Ronald’s relationship. Unfortunately, Ronald’s pining comes across as merely an excuse for all of the comedy bits so the epilogue falls flat.
College is a mediocre Keaton film, which makes it better than most of what you will find in the silent era. The hits are smile-inducing at best, but the misses are groan-worthy.
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