College (1927)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Main Menu Audio Introduction-David Robinson Short Film-Allez Oop (1934) Short Film-Run Girl, Run (1928) Featuring Carole Lombard Featurette-Excerpt From The Buster Keaton Show (1949) Featurette-Candid Camera Excerpt (1959) Trailer-How To Stuff A Wild Bikini (1965) Bonus Episode-Cartoon - Sports Chumpions (1941) Bonus Episode-Cartoon - Ball Park (1929)
Rating
Year Of Production	1927
Running Time	62:54
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (60:02)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	James W. Horne
Studio Distributor	Madman Entertainment	Starring	Buster Keaton Florence Turner Anne Cornwall Flora Bramley Harold Goodwin Snitz Edwards Sam Crawford Carl Harbaugh Grant Withers
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	None Given

    College was the film Buster Keaton made immediately after the classic The General. According to David Robinson's introduction included on this disc, United Artists assumed more control over the budget for this production in order to ensure that costs were contained and that they did not suffer the same financial loss they had experienced on the previous film. College certainly seems less ambitious and less of a stretch for Keaton's talent.

    The mid-1920s saw a slew of comedies and dramas set in the collegiate world. Robinson dates this to Harold Lloyd's The Freshman in 1925, and there was a tremendous number of movies over the next few years with college students as the main focus. Even the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu tried his hand at the genre. The college comedies dovetailed neatly with the "flapper" genre, but it all came crashing down with the stockmarket crash, as film subjects became more sombre or histrionic. The college comedy did make something of a comeback in the second half of the 1930s, and has remained popular on and off to the present day.

    In this effort, Ronald (Buster Keaton) is the high school valedictorian whose graduation speech is on "the curse of athletics". This puts him offside with potential girlfriend Mary (Anne Cornwall), who would prefer an athlete to an egghead any day. That suits bad guy Jeff (Harold Goodwin), who has taken seven years to graduate but is the most popular boy in school, in part due to his athletic pursuits.

    On to Clayton College, where Mary and Jeff have both secured places. Despite not being able to afford the fees, Ronald is also attending but needs to work his way through. Welcomed by the Dean (Snitz Edwards, a minor cult figure among silent film aficionados) as a scholar rather than a sportsman, Ronald opens his luggage to reveal sporting clothing and equipment, and books on how to play baseball, football and so on. Ronald tries out for every sporting team in the college but fails miserably at almost every step, until the Dean forces him on the rowing team coach as the coxswain.

    I'd better stop there before I give away the whole plot. There really isn't much of a plot, more an excuse for Keaton to display his keen sense of physical comedy in a series of sporting endeavours. Much of the short running time is taken up with his hilarious attempts to emulate his fellow college men on the athletics track. There are also some quite funny scenes where Ronald tries to hold down jobs as a soda jerk and a coloured waiter - the latter sequence not quite politically correct by modern standards but fairly tame for the era. The epilogue might surprise some people given that the film is a comedy, though I see it more as an indication that they lived happily ever after than some morbid, melancholy reflection on life.

    A couple of actors to point out. Ronald's mother is played by Florence Turner, who became possibly the world's first film star identifiable by name. She was known as "The Vitagraph Girl". Although only in her early forties she looks considerably older in 1927. The other actor is Grant Withers who became a minor star in the early 1930s. He's one of the college boys.

    While this is not Keaton's best film, it is still very funny. It is certainly better than anything he made after the first two features at MGM, and you can get a sense of how his career went downhill after that by watching some of the extras.

Video

    The film is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, which is probably the original aspect ratio given that 1.37:1 was adopted as a standard to accommodate optical soundtracks.

    This is the best I have ever seen the film look. Most of the footage is taken from original 35mm materials and is quite sharp and detailed. There are a few sequences that probably only survived in duplicate prints or 16mm reductions and these can readily be identified by a sudden loss of clarity and detail. Thankfully these are limited to brief shots and there are not that many of them.

    The black and white cinematography is well rendered here with excellent gray scale. Blacks are nice and solid and whites, while not clean, are also quite good. There is some flicker due to variations in brightness.

    Some aliasing can be seen in backgrounds but the effect is very minor. There are some film artefacts of course, this film being almost 80 years old now. Most of these artefacts are scratches and flecks, though there is also some minor decomposition as well.

    There are no subtitles, this being a silent film. The disc is RSDL-formatted. Considering the film only runs 63 minutes, you would think that the entire feature could be accommodated on a single layer. But no, they had to insert a layer change at 60:02, with less than three minutes remaining in the running time. The layer break not only interrupts a sequence but also the music, meaning that it is quite disruptive.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is not much to report here. The audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 in stereo without surround encoding. The audio consists entirely of an organ score. The music sounds familiar in patches though I could not name any of the themes used. I suspect the composer has drawn on popular tunes of the era, as the music sounds very idiomatic, the sort you would probably have heard if you had seen the movie in a theatre in 1928. There is no credit either on the case or on the disc itself for the composer or the organist.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Main Menu Audio

    A musical selection from the score accompanies the static main menu.

Introduction-David Robinson (5:08)

    The menu options give a choice of watching the film with or without the introduction. I suggest that if you haven't seen the film, watch it without the introduction as there are some spoilers contained in it. Robinson's introduction gives a background and context to the production in a similar vein to the introductions he did for the Chaplin Collection.

Short Film-Allez Oop (1934) (20:21)

    While only six years separate this from the main feature, this Elmer comedy made for Educational Pictures show how far Keaton's career had fallen. He plays a clock repairer with an interest in one of his clients, who herself becomes enamoured of a trapeze artist. This low budget comedy is pretty low grade.

Short Film-Run Girl, Run (1928) (17:50)

    A mildly amusing short from the Mack Sennett studios featuring ingénue Carole Lombard as a youthful athlete from a girls' college. Some very obvious gags in the Sennett style. The sports mistress is played by Australian-born comedienne Daphne Pollard.

Featurette-Excerpt From The Buster Keaton Show (1949) (27:34)

    This is hard to watch as it seems to have been kinescoped from the original broadcast, and consequently it is blurry and lacking in detail. Rather than an excerpt as it is billed it seems to be almost complete. Buster plays a character trying to get fit, which gives him an opportunity to work his magic with some gym equipment in between Studebaker commercials. It's a little sad that the script seems to patronise Keaton, with the other characters referring to him as "B.K.", but he still shows that in his mid-50s he could still do pratfalls and physical comedy with immaculate timing. The show was co-written by silent comedy writer/director Clyde Bruckman, who had worked with Keaton in the 1920s on several films and received a co-direction credit on The General. Harvey Parry plays Rocky - he had been a stunt man in the silent era and much later would be interviewed for the TV series Hollywood: The Pioneers.

    The IMDb erroneously states that this is the only surviving episode of the series. One should also note that this show comes with several commercials for the 1950 Studebaker. Wow, what a car! The audio sync is way out on these commercials.

Featurette-Candid Camera Excerpt (1959) (5:39)

    This excerpt from the popular series has Buster as a diner patron having mishaps with a bowl of soup and some sandwiches, to the unwitting amusement of the poor saps caught on the candid camera.

Trailer-How To Stuff A Wild Bikini (1965) (1:58)

    They don't make them like this any more. A beach comedy with Annette Funicello which features Buster in a supporting role. This trailer features him prominently, but not as prominently as a banal song sung by our heroine.

Bonus Episode-Cartoon - Sports Chumpions (1941) (6:59)

    A Friz Freleng Warners cartoon on a sporting theme, comprising a host of brief gags. The print material used here does not nearly approach the quality of Warners' own releases.

Bonus Episode-Cartoon - Ball Park (1929) (5:20)

    A Paul Terry Aesop's Fables cartoon featuring the ball game between the Gorillas and the Felines. In black and white and with music and sound effects, but no dialogue.

    There have been a few releases of this movie worldwide. In France, a Region 2 release from mk2 is the source of the new Region 4. It comes as part of a set of Keaton's independent features.

    An older Region 4 release from Force Video was licensed from the US Region 1 release that was put together by Film Preservation Associates, one of the better quality companies putting out silent material. The Force release is quite good, with acceptable video quality and some good extras in a couple of Buster's short silents, One Week and The Blacksmith. The quality though is not nearly as good as the new Region 4. It seems to be an NTSC to PAL transfer and suffers from ghosting artefacts, as well as being less sharp and detailed.

    A Region 1 release from Kino Video sounds as though it is of the same quality as the Force Video release minus the conversion artefacts, and it has three short silents as extras.

    All things considered, if you don't want to buy the French set then the new Region 4 is the best available.

    A fine comedy by one of the great film comedians.

    The video quality is excellent.

    The audio quality is very good.

    An excellent selection of bonus material.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall