Let's Go Collegiate (1941) User Reviews

College based comedy seems to have been made up on the spot

[dbborroughs · 6/10 · 14 February 2007]

Frankie Darro, Mantan Moreland and Keye Luke in the tale of a college rowing team. It seems that the new guy and hope for the team to win the state championship has been drafted. Not wanting to let the girls down the boys end up getting a guy off the street to pretend to be the great new rower at a party. Unfortunately now that "Herc" has a taste for college life he won't leave and now its up to the guys to get him through classes and to make him into a great rower.

Having the slimmest of plots this movie slips from scene to scene with no clear direction in mind (its better in pieces rather than as a whole). Occasionally it pauses for some passable, but forgettable songs before heading off toward its conclusion, though like much of this movie it seems to have been made up on the spot. Frankie Darro is good as always, Mantan is good but isn't on screen enough. Keye Luke is completely wasted in a role that has him spouting Charlie Chan like bits of wisdom and knocking the coaches glasses off. Its an okay time killer, the sort of thing you put on when you don't want to be taxed on any level. Worth seeing if you run across it

Frankie Goes to College!!!!

[kidboots · 5/10 · 3 October 2008]

It seems only fitting that Frankie Darro, who had been playing newsboys, kid brothers, best friends and jockeys all through the 1930s should finally get to college in his mid 20s. Marcia Mae Jones, who also starred in this film had been in movies since she was 3. She made a huge splash as the highly strung Rosalie in "These Three" (1936) and also got to play opposite Shirley Temple in "Heidi" and "The Little Princess" but after that it was back to minor roles.

Frankie (Frankie Darro)and Tad (Jackie Moran) find out Bob Terry, the best rower in college has been drafted into the army. So the boys (along with Keye Luke, the smartest one among them, and Mantan Moreland) pay a removalist, Herc, (Frank Sully) $10 to impersonate Bob Terry. Herc, is actually an escaped robber but nothing is done about it - a policeman comes to the college tracking him down but it is forgotten about. Even though he likes attending a frat party - where he becomes engaged to the boy's girls Bess (Marcia Mae Jones) and Midge (Gale Storm), rowing is a different matter, as boats make him seasick. Frankie solves that by feeding him seasickness tablets during the race. Also Herc is a dunce in class - unlike the real Bob Terry, who is an honor student. It is a pretty predictable film with a lot of things left up in the air.

It is definitely a showcase for pretty Gale Storm, who gets to sing two songs - "Sweet Sixteen" and "Look What You've Done to Me". This should have led to better things but she spent most of the 40s in films just like this until she came into her own in the 50s with her own television series "My Little Margie" and "The Gale Storm Show". Frank Faylan also has a bit as a college "old boy". Jackie Moran was a lesser known child actor whose most memorable role was as Huck Finn in the 1938 film "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer".

... or not ...

[ONenslo · 4/10 · 23 September 2005]

Any old time college movie has one plot: the big game, the big race, or the big dance, and the only way to bring it off is to sneak in a ringer from outside the school. This time it is the big race - a rowing race. (The rowing practice all takes place in front of a bizarre and inexplicable rear-projected vista of OIL WELLS.) Not even Mantan can pep up these proceedings - it doesn't make you suffer, nor is it anything to write home about. A pretty harmless way to kill an hour or so. If there is one memorable thing in the movie, and there is exactly one memorable thing, it is Gale Storm's first musical number - she is incredibly vivacious and sexy, in a dress which emphasizes her charms in a remarkable yet very chaste way. I may watch it again just for that. I don't think it's a spoiler to warn you that EVERYTHING TURNS OUT ALL RIGHT IN THE END. You already knew that.

If you have the right memories, you'll enjoy meeting Barton Yarborough

[Terrell-4 · 3/10 · 26 April 2008]

"Say, Jeff," says Frankie (Frankie Darro), a student at Rawley University who is doing some biology homework, "do you know how the head is formed?" "Well," says Jeff (Mantan Moreland, bugging his eyes and rolling his head), "I'd say it starts at the base of the spine and works its way up to a lump."

That's as good as Let's Go Collegiate gets, folks...except for two things, and one of these depends on how old you are. The movie is a dispensable programmer, one of thousands churned out quickly by studios (Monogram, in this case), which had minimal budgets and shooting schedules and, often, minimal plots. With Let's Go Collegiate, Frankie Darro plays the coxswain on what might be Rawley University's first champion rowing team in 15 years. When Bob Terry, the new star stroke for the team, who hasn't arrived at Rawley yet, gets drafted, Frankie and his pal, Tad, spot a big guy, Herc Bevans, hefting a safe on the street. They immediately decide to recruit him for the team and substitute him for Terry. That way their girls will continue to think they'll be heroes when the team wins the big race. Of course, the big guy is prone to sea sickness, Frankie and Tad may get booted off the team because they're spending so much time coaching Herc that their grades have slipped, their girl friends have fallen for Herc, their coach loses his glasses, and Herc has a secret that's discovered only after the team wins.

As one of several popular movies Frankie Darro starred in with Mantan Moreland as his pal, always named Jeff, this one isn't much. Moreland gets stuck with all the stereotypical mugging and dialect that passed for racial humor back then. The acting is self-conscious. Collegiate movies about the big game were a cliché even in 1940. So what are the two exceptions? First is one excellent song sung at a fraternity/sorority dance by Gale Storm. She plays Midge, seventh billed, and is one of the girlfriends. The song is "Look What You have Done to Me," music by Edward Kay and lyrics by Harry Tobias. It's a bright, swinging song with a smooth melodic line that takes a couple of unexpected turns. It's a quality song and you'll never hear it unless you slog through Let's Go Collegiate.

The second exception depends on how old you are. Barton Yarborough, a journeyman film actor who made 17 movies in the Forties, plays the role of Coach Walsh. For those of us old enough to recall sitting around the radio in the evening, Yarborough was Doc Long, one of the three major characters in perhaps the greatest adventure series on radio...drum roll, please..."I Love a Mystery." It went on the air in 1939, became hugely popular and then sputtered out in 1952 as television took over. Jack Packard was the tough, smart leader of the three, Doc Long was the ebullient one, always ready for a fight or a laugh. Reggie York was big and strong, and fancied himself as much a ladies man as Doc did. They were old friends who started a detective agency in San Francisco. Most of the installments ran 15 minutes and Carlton Morse, the man who also created and wrote "One Man's Family", wrote all. Jack, Doc and Reggie were always getting involved in dangerous adventures and mysteries, with lots of action and vivid situations. If you were sitting around your radio, you didn't need CGI to visualize the worst that was happening. All this was delivered in your home every weeknight. One of the memorable things about I Love a Mystery was the opening theme, Valse Triste, a brooding, foreboding dark melody if there ever was one.

Yarborough was born in 1900 and died in 1951. He played Doc Long until the last year of the show. He also was a key character in Morse's "One Man's Family," playing Cliff Barbour when the series started in 1932 until he died. Yarborough had a distinctive voice that doesn't seem like much when you see him in Let's Go Collegiate. And he doesn't look like how I imagined the young Doc Long. He used his voice memorably as Doc (and as Cliff Barbour). That was the point of radio.

The impression of great adventures brought distinctively to life in "I Love a Mystery" is still vivid in my memory. Another radio highlight for a little kid listening alone one afternoon to, I think, Jack Armstrong, was when a beautiful and evil woman dispatched a victim by taking a hat pin from her hair and driving it into the guy's ear. That sent me out running into the yard, where I stayed until someone came home. I was not about to take the chance that this woman and her hat pin might emerge from a closet and rush toward me. Those are the delights of a person's imagination, free of the can-you-top-this curse of too much CGI. Give me a hat pin in the hand of a beautiful woman any day instead of an enhanced comic book hero flying through mile-high explosions.

You ain't playin' around with no 8-ball!

[Phil Reeder · 3/10 · 19 April 2011]

Tolerable time-waster notable mainly for featuring at least two cast members who went on to conquer better things. The story: the never-seen star rower Bob Terry has been confiscated by the army, and two of his teammates pull the old switcharoo using a random but burly guy they meet (Frank Sully) who, unknown to them, is wanted by the law (he's a safe-cracker). Not only do Frankie and Tad have to overcome this monkey's seasickness (using mothballs?) they also must make the guy smart so he won't flunk biology and get kicked off the rowing team. Helping them is Martan Moreland, who's responsible for much of the film's laughs - "Take it easy, Mr Frankie, you ain't playin' around with no 8-ball!"

Joining the fun are Gale Storm who went on to TV fame with MY LITTLE MARGIE and Frank Faylen from DOBIE GILLIS and Disney's THE MONKEY'S UNCLE. Watch for a scene where Faylen punches a guy in the chin, causing him to fall backwards. TMU features a scene that parallels this one, only it's Annette punching Faylen, causing him to fall backward - accompanied by a hilarious musical sound effect. Other comic scenes of note are where the absent-minded biology prof can't find his frog and wonders if he accidentally ate it for lunch (and this guy has the nerve to flunk students?) - and Moreland explaining "metatarsus" to girlfriend. Keye Luke from the Charlie Chan series adds a multicultural element.

Go away, collegiate...

[mart-45 · 5/10 · 24 July 2006]

Well well well... how did they ever think of that? A beautiful example, of how a film can be produced without any help from the scriptwriters! Fortunately there are some beautiful people filling up the screen time to keep us distracted. First of all, Gale Storm is absolutely gorgeous. She's beautiful and sexy and yet she looks like a teenager, and her voice is quite charming - yet not quite what it became about ten years later, when she concentrated on her recording career. Jackie Moran has a very sober acting style and looks very handsome until he undresses in the last reel - then he looks like a huge sausage. There are about three songs in that film, and these are quite good, so you might want to check this flick out for an hour of entertainment. Classical Musicals 50 movie pack helps you.

Don't Rock the Boat

[wes-connors · 3/10 · 3 April 2011]

When the star rower for Rawley University gets drafted, resourceful Frankie Darro (as Frankie Monahan) and student pal Jackie Moran (as Tad) hire husky Frank Sully (as Hercules "Herk" Bevans) to pose as the absent boatman. The plan backfires when Mr. Sully romances his new friends' cute college girlfriends, Gale Storm (as Midge Lawrence) and Marcia Mae Jones (as Bess Martin). Listen for Ms. Storm to sing "Look What You've Done to Me", sidekick Keye Luke (as Buck Wing) to add a little Chinese philosophy, and servile Mantan Moreland (as Jeff) to sing the line "Is you callin' a spade a spade?"

*** Let's Go Collegiate (9/12/41) Jean Yarbrough ~ Frankie Darro, Jackie Moran, Mantan Moreland, Gale Storm

Mildly enjoyable...but also terrible.

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 26 July 2019]

I was torn between giving it a 2 or a 3, I can't see why you'd want to see it in the first place! Even for a cheap B-movie...it's amazingly bad though still watchable.

When the story begins, the new champion rower who is supposed to be coming to a fictional college apparently is NOT coming because he just got drafted. It never was clear why, but Frankie (Frankie Darro) and his friends pick some guy off the street and pass him off as this champion rower. Now the guy looks about 40, is overweight and looks about as athletic as Jabba the Hut...and the entire story continues to make no sense at all. What really makes no sense is that this non-athlete, after just a few times practicing, turns out to be amazing at rowing...as well as...well...you see the film if you really care.

The film is just dumb....and the plot seems as if the writers took a bunch of story ideas, threw them into a hat and picked them out randomly. Honestly...the film is a confusing and silly mess but at least Mantan Moreland is around to provide a few laughs...but only a few!

Rah! Rah! Rawley!

[boblipton · 6/10 · 24 June 2023]

Rawley University has never won a national championship in crew rowing. However, a new transfer is expected to make all the difference to the team.... until he's drafted. Crew members Frankie Darrow and Jackie Moran come across Frank Sully, whom they think a truck driver. So they decide to pass him off as their new star. With the connivance of fellow student Keye Luke and whatever role Mantan Moreland plays, they seem to be about to put the hoax over, even though their girls Marcia Mae Jones and Gale Storm each wind up engaged to Sully.

Unlike most movies set at colleges, this one actually has students in class rooms, more than two minutes of time. With Jean Yarborough directing, there's a lot of set-piece comedy at work, and it's all fairly amusing, except for Frank Faylen and Paul Maxey as two alumni. There are three songs, two of them sung by Miss Storm, which are decent if not particularly remarkable.

If this movie was a student, it would be expelled!

[mark.waltz · 2/10 · 15 September 2012]

This is one of those films that defies reality by trying to make its audience believe that even in 1941, colleges didn't fully check out the identities of their new students. When one of those Freshman, a scholar expected to become their crew teams new star, is drafted, another student (Frankie Darro) finds a replacement to stand in for him and creates a monster, taking away all the available women and managing to stay on the team in spite of extremely poor grades. Darro, the Ralph Macchio of his day, is as youthful as he was 7 years before in the classic "Wild Boys of the Road", but is given poor material. As for the talented black character actor Mantan Moreland, he appears much smarted than the bug-eyed style lines he is given, relegated as usual to 8-ball jokes that are simply stupid rather than intelligently offensive. Musical numbers fail to create sparks, and the young women in the cast (particularly Marcia Mae Jones) are presented as stereotypically annoying rather than interesting and likable.

in a nutshell

[Cristi_Ciopron · 8/10 · 13 March 2016]

A musical comedy with Marcia Mae Jones, Gale Storm, Darro, Moran, Moreland, K. Luke, Tr. Coffin (in a bit role) and Fr. Sully. It's a reunion of Monogram's players, in a movie about a safe-cracker who is hired to impersonate a rower, and likes it; Darro is much better than Moran, Marcia Mae than Gale, and it belongs to Moreland to upstage all others. While the racism is filthy (but the black performer had his trademark good-natured dignity), and the misogyny trite, everyone comes across as silly, and the girls' doubtful honor is rescued only by chance. Several elements hint at slapstick: the duos (with Moran a bit rustic for his role, he doesn't look like a student more than the impersonator), the absurd situations (like Fr. Sully's hypothetical handsomeness). The downside is that the black manservant is shown pleased with his ordeal. The main characters are five youngsters (the Asian gets proverbs, but not a girlfriend …), a manservant and an impersonator; the supporting characters are a professor, a coach, two former students, and the slugger.

At once I have found an impression of early movie-going, and many beloved players (but rightly receded, since almost none of them were actors, only mediocre and sub-mediocre players). It reminded me of the movies I saw in theaters in the late '80s, this one should of been one of them. It gave me the sentiment of my early movie-going, as a kid in the late '80s, when, in my country, '40s movies, mesmerizing and refreshing, were still shown in movie theaters, indeed, 50 yrs old movies were still shown.

Very light, funny save for the filthy racism, lowbrow; but the acting reeks of mediocrity, although now, with the passing of so many decades, the mediocrity is harmless. For instance, Darro wasn't nearly as good as could be Gorcey, and Gorcey himself was often mediocre; Moran was, like Marcia Mae, a walking frankfurter, while Coffin played like a chopper, and, as a sage wrote once, not everybody in the '40s was Bogart (or whoever is one's idea of cool) …. The sensation is that Moreland was the only authentic actor, the only one having talent and personality, and being able to provide for a positive characterization, and to convey creative distinctiveness.

In terms of cast, it synthesizes everything Monogram had best to offer. For this lovable studio, it was an all star cast.

Let's Go Collegiate was amusing enough for my tastes

[tavm · 5/10 · 18 July 2014]

This is a college comedy of the early '40s that has a big race involved. It involves-no, not football or basketball-but rowing. It seems the one who's supposed to help the team win has been drafted so two of the boys get someone to impersonate him. Turns out he's someone who's not very smart and actually gets sick in the sport so one of these boys gives him some pills. I'll stop there and just say this was quite amusing much of the 62-minute running time and there were also some good songs to pad the proceedings, a couple of which were sung by Gale Storm, later known on TV as "My Little Margie". Mantan Moreland and Keye Luke are also pretty amusing enough if not hilariously so. So on that note, Let's Go Collegiate is worth a look. P.S. By the way, I always like to cite when a player from my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life-is in another film and here's it's Frank Faylen as one of the alumni coming for a visit.

Good old Rawley U

[bkoganbing · 4/10 · 9 June 2017]

As this is a Monogram Picture, cheap sets, newsreel footage and lousy editing are a given. But the cast does try to pull this one through and they only miss by a hair.

Let's Go Collegiate has Frankie Darro, Jack Moran, and Keye Luke as fraternity brothers who receive some really bad news. Darro is on the rowing team and the new anchor gets his draft notice before the big match. So these guys try to come up with a substitute and they do with Frank Sully. One sight of him hoisting a safe and they've got their guy.

The trouble is that he's a lunkhead, but that could be passed over with the explanation of special grades for athletes. Teaching him how to row is another matter, he's got a phobia about water. Sully as the new big man on campus is also scoring with the women, their women like Marcie Jones and Gale Storm.

Let's Go Collegiate is a pleasant enough film, but had it been done at a big studio it sure would have been better.