The Band Plays On (1934) User Reviews

Doesn't hit a sour note.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 2 March 2021]

This is your typical college football hero drama (with lots of comedy) about four childhood friends, getting into trouble as youngsters but turning their lives around and struggling to get through college where they become football heroes. There's more character development than just the anticipation of the big game so you really feel like you get to know the characters played by Robert Young, Stuart Erwin, William Tannen and Russell Hardie, with real life beauty queen Betty Furness in good support as their lifelong female friend.

There's also Preston Foster, Ted Healey and Leo Carrillo, getting lots of laughs while pressing pants, and Healey his typical brassy self as Furness's black sheep brother. The storyline Texas into various directions, and the camera gets to go outside for an amazing speed chase in the country (resulting in a car accident), as well as the woods where some of the cast is camping. The mixture of sports, youthful drama, light farce and romance makes this a better film than I expected, showing that someone in the MGM writer's building was striving for something different.

Fictionalized Four Horsemen

[boblipton · 6/10 · 10 May 2014]

This movie about the lives, loves and problems of four young friends who grow up to be the core of a winning college football team is very well put together. However, like other movies in which the storyline stretches over a long time, it seems unfocused and long-winded.

Given the large number of stars, up-and-coming actors and would-be stars, that's probably inevitable. There are some very good performances from people I would not expect to give them. Stu Erwin shows flashes of temper that are contrary to his usual milksop persona. Betty Furness, whose abilities as a movie actress usually began and ended with her having been Miss America, is sweet and believable. However, those sequences resort to a lot of chitchat and that is not very cinematic. Cameraman Leonard Smith compensates with a lot of traveling shots; editor William LeVanway uses a lot more wipes than MGM pictures typically did.

The result is a movie that is eminently watchable for its details and sequences but seems a lot longer in getting to the inevitable redemptive football game than the 87 minutes this clocks in at. It's an engrossing but unmemorable movie.