COLLEGE HOLIDAY (1936)

For much of the ‘30s, you could work up a DNA profile of major Hollywood studios thru their mid-list musicals.  Warners leaned Populist; M-G-M went with Swank; while Paramount’s heart belonged to Dada, nutty, irreverent, a bit surreal.  (Paramount really had two styles: Dadaist and Bing Crosby, a genre all its own.)  This silly example of the Dada Revue has a struggling resort hotel rescued by students from a nearby college who put on a show with an Ancient Greek theme.  This takes care of the plot by pleasing rich Hellenistic patron Mary Boland and gives those comely co-eds revealing costumes.  Jack Benny is both co-owner of the hotel on the plot side, as well as the film’s informal interlocutor, while George Burns & Gracie Allen dish mildly funny non-sequiturs, Martha Raye makes faces and sings better than you expect, Ben Blue does some standout eccentric dancing (best thing in here), with the bland romantic angle carried by hearty Leif Erickson & a very pretty Marsha Hunt while Johnny Downs & Eleanor Whitney croon some neat Leo Robin/Ralph Rainger tunes.  Nothing to write home about, but the reason the film has completely fallen off the map undoubtedly stems from a gimmick topic which uses the whole class for an experiment in Eugenics (a topic that grew ever less amusing) and thru its big Minstrel Show climax.  Okay at first, it’s an All-White minstrel show.  But not for long!  One by one, then in serried ranks assembled, BlackFace comes upon most of the cast.  Poor Martha Raye gets a real workout, on stage with an actual Black child playing cupid.  Yikes!  Benny, Boland, Burns & Allen all keep their noses clean, so to speak.  Benny even gets to show off his ‘time step.’  But the ‘corking up’ is, if possible, even more objectionable/less motivated than usual.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: With Mitchell Leisen rather than Frank Tuttle helming, many of the same suspects did THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1937, a better example of the form, out shortly before this.