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| Blogs > rsbrandt44 > They Call Me...The Professor |
Breeders Cup
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Breeders Cup  In 2014, Paramount's College Holiday (1936) made its debut on Turner Classic Movies, but I scooped 'em: We booked this for an all-night movie marathon when I was in college back in the 1970's, based in part on my perusing ancient back issues of The New Yorker and Variety in the school library. It's an oddball little item in which Jack Benny's scheme to import college students from across America to be entertainers at his California hotel requires duping an eccentric heiress (Mary Boland) who wants to use them for a eugenics experiment to breed little Greek gods and goddesses. Her advisor, Professor Hercules, uses a scheme for genetic selection that revolves around the finely-tuned psychic powers of...Gracie Allen? If that weren't oddball enough, the musical's big number is a minstrel show. Everyone is amazingly young, even George Burns and especially Martha Raye, Marsha Hunt and Leif Erickson(!), but the laughs don't really pick up until Burns and Allen gallop onto the scene, with the exception of Benny's admonition to the hot-blooded students he's chaperoning: "Don't forget the three N's: No necking, Not now, and Nnn-nnn." Except that both feature musical numbers, you'd never guess that director Frank Tuttle would go on in a few years to make This Gun For Hire. "Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year." - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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