Varsity Show (1937)

Undescribable Perfection

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

. . . sing America's school kids exactly 22 minutes, 21 seconds into VARSITY SHOW, as Warner Bros. anticipates Betsy DeVos' amazing feat in surpassing even Kellyanne Conway for the title of "The Most Deplorable Woman in America" 80 years before the fact. "How do you handle a problem like DeVorhea?" these Warner warning singers might as well paraphrase the Mother Superior from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Warner Bros. suggests that squatting in mass sit-ins will be the best way. When the kids take over the Fat Cat's "Stuyvesant Theatre" toward the end of VARSITY SHOW, no one can dislodge them. The regular NYPD cops fail. The Riot Squad fails. Even the rifle-toting New York National Guard fails. These scores of men ALL remember their High School Civics Classes (which Betsy DeVour, of course, would eliminate and outlaw) which taught them that their Oath to Uphold America's Constitution AGAINST DOMESTIC ENEMIES such as Pathologically Lying Fake News-Inventing Job-Killing Election-Rigging Depression-Causing Murderous Greedhead Republicans Trumps any of these Red Commie KGB Usurpers' allegedly legal orders. It's okay to Begin the Resistance with Nonviolent Sit-ins, Warner advises us here, but at the FIRST DROP of Blue Collar or Student Blood it's a case of All Hands on Deck to TAKE BACK America by Any Means Necessary!

Mindless fluff, but a lot of fun all the way through. Busby Berkeley sure knew a thing or two about troop formations. This 1930s Warner Bros. musical/comedy features a fresh cast, including Priscilla Lane, Sterling Holloway, Johnnie "Scat" Davis, Mabel Todd, and Rosemary Lane as college kids. Dick Powell is an alumnus enlisted to help stage the school show, with Ted Healy along for the ride. Lots of 1930s-era college silliness, with freshman caps, fraternity pins, sorority houses, school pride and all that. Berkeley choreographs the rah-rah finale, while the "plot" is never entirely resolved. Priscilla Lane is very cute as an enthusiastic coed and older sister Rosemary Lane is very pretty as the romantic lead.

I wonder what happened with the missing 40 minutes from "Varsity Show". IMDb lists its original running time as 120 minutes but the Turner DVD is only 80--meaning a third of the film is missing. Perhaps this is just a mistake and the film was always 80 minutes but I wonder if the studio thought 120 minutes made the film incredibly sluggish and they decided to re-edit it--though cutting out THAT much seems very unlikely. Can anyone shed any light on this for me? Dick Powell as well as Fred Waring and his orchestra star in this light-hearted college musical. Apparently the folks at Winfield College are going to put on another VERY boring show--thanks to the very dull Professor Biddle who insists they do it his way. The students want to breath energy into the program and invite Mr. Daly (Powell) to 'spice it up'. But the faculty is adamant--so what are these co-eds to do? Why SING of course! And, in the end, instead of Mr. Daly saving the college show, the students (much like in "Babes on Broadway") put on a show to save the career of swell 'ol Mr. Daly.Overall, this is pure escapist fun. While the songs aren't particularly memorable, they are enjoyable. And the final BIG production number (choreographed by Busby Berkeley) is also quite amazing--and better than most of his efforts. While I am not a huge fan of this sort of film, for what this is, it's amazingly well done. Proof that it wasn't just MGM that could make a nice musical, as Warner had a long string of big production number musicals in the 30s. Worth seeing.By the way, I liked Dick Powell's line "Get back to your rooms and crack a book...". That's because in practically every college film of the 30s and 40s, you almost NEVER see these folks studying or attending classes! Seeing them in the next scene actually studying was a shocker! Although, not surprisingly, the studying session didn't last very long!

I was looking forward to seeing Varsity Show because of the fact that I owned the four Dick Powell Decca recordings that were made from songs in this film. The Tony Thomas book, the Films of Dick Powell also said that it was a 2 hour film. In the abbreviated 80 minute version I saw of it, I'm thinking there was a lot of material that was left out and may in fact now be lost. Two of those songs Powell did not sing on the screen, Have You Got Any Castles Baby and Love Is On The Air Tonight. He did do a very nice version of You've Got Something There with Rosemary Lane and the song Moonlight On The Campus seems to have been edited out all together.Still even in the shortened version Varsity Show is an entertaining bit of nonsense about a Broadway producer played by Powell who's had a run of bad luck, but answers the call of the student body of his alma mater to produce their Varsity Show. It was the kind of light weight material that Powell was desperately trying to get out of doing at Warner Brothers, but Jack Warner wouldn't see him in anything else.Jack did give him a good cast to work with however with a lot of very familiar character actors going through their paces. Standing out are Ted Healy on loan from MGM playing Powell's assistant, Edward Brophy as the theater manager who's about to have a stroke because he can't get an advance for rent from the college kids, and Walter Catlett who is very funny as the faculty adviser for the show who knows as much about putting on a show as Ginger Rogers running the Brooklyn Dodgers to quote another Dick Powell song from another film.Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians are here to supply the music and chorus and Rosemary's sister Priscilla Lane is another student. The dancing talent is tops with Lee Dixon who had co-starred with Powell in Golddiggers of 1937 and the great team of Buck and Bubbles who I still remember from the Ed Sullivan Show as a lad. Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer wrote the original songs that I liked so much.Varsity Show got an Academy Award nomination for Busby Berkeley in the category of Dance Direction which was discarded in the Forties. Berkeley did one of his patented extravaganzas for a finale using the theme songs from several colleges and it's quite an eyeful and most entertaining.I hope one day we can get a restored version of Varsity Show. I'm betting a lot of good material might be lost as it stands right now. I have a feeling I'd rate Varsity Show higher if we saw the director's cut.