Complete credited cast: | |||
Buster Keaton | ... | A Son | |
Anne Cornwall | ... | The Girl | |
![]() |
Flora Bramley | ... | Her Friend |
Harold Goodwin | ... | A Rival | |
Snitz Edwards | ... | The Dean | |
Carl Harbaugh | ... | Crew Coach | |
![]() |
Sam Crawford | ... | Baseball Coach |
Florence Turner | ... | A Mother |
Ronald's high school valedictory address praises books and condemns sports. His girlfriend Mary condemns his attitude. He fears losing her to rival Jeff, decides to go to college and pay more attention to sports. Written by Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
Purists like to dismiss Buster Keaton's ninth feature as an atypical and thus somehow unworthy commercial compromise forced by the relative failure of his previous masterpiece 'The General'. But while it may not have the deeper resonance of other Keaton comedies it certainly isn't lacking for laughs. The scenario itself is common enough, presenting a variation of Harold Lloyd's popular college comedy 'The Freshman', featuring Buster as an Ivy League bookworm attempting athletic competition to impress a disinterested girlfriend. But the bits of comedy in between the plot lines are unique and many, making this a film of details, some of them quite startling: Buster, carrying a tray of soup, doing a backward somersault without spilling a drop, or trying his hand at every possible track and field event with predictably embarrassing but inventive results, or adding a hilariously cold-blooded epilogue to the happily-ever-after fadeout. No matter how familiar it might appear in outline, the world inhabited by Keaton was all his own, and always contained surprises enough to delight the unwary, inattentive viewer.