While this isn’t one of my favorite Buster Keaton films, any classic Buster is good classic Buster. My biased modern brain tends to think of College as “good for a silent movie,” whereas Buster’s best work is good, period. Still, there are some fine laughs to be found in this collegiate comedy.
Let’s ignore the fact that Buster was in his early 30s and playing an 18-year-old here, specifically the highly academic and staunchly anti-athletics Ronald. However, when his girlfriend Mary turns up her nose at Ronald’s scholarly focus, he changes his tune in the hopes of winning her back. As he works his way through college, he tries his hand at a wide array of sports, determined to impress Mary if it kills him – which is a distinct possibility.
Right off the bad, part of the problem is that Mary is no prize. She’s cute, sure, but she’s awfully quick to throw Ronald over, and you can’t shake the idea that she’s not worth the back-breaking effort he’s putting in. From baseball to football to track, he throws himself into his athletic pursuits and finds that his collection of how-to books haven’t prepared him. Each new sport offers a different set piece in which Ronald tries his luck and, generally, falls flat on his face.
This is the movie’s other major sticking point: Ronald is an almost hopelessly-uncoordinated weakling. Now, Buster’s characters usually start out clumsy and end up nimble with little explanation of how they got to be so, but the contrast seems starker in this film. Ronald is such an athletic charity case that he can’t outrun a pair of little boys half his size, so it doesn’t quite feel genuine when he becomes strong, swift, and graceful by the movie’s close. Not to mention, plenty of the costumes plainly show how muscular Buster is, and a throwaway stunt early on demonstrates that, while Ronald is tragic on the sports field, he can somersault while holding a cup and saucer and not spill a drop. Uncoordinated weakling – really?
But that’s enough about the movie’s faults. The above-mentioned stunt is a definite rewind-moment, where Buster does something so funny or impressive that I have to see it again. Though Collegedoesn’t have as many of these moments as my favorite films of his, it still has some fun sequences. There’s a scene of Ronald valiantly trying to do tricks while working in an ice cream parlor – tossing the scoops and catching them in the cup, that kind of thing – that’s a stitch, and the entire opening is a riot. Buster puts some rain-soaked clothes and a seat by the radiator to excellent comedic use, and he does this odd little tilting motion while giving a speech that I simply can’t describe. I could die laughing at him in this scene, and all he’s doing is leaning – he really was one-of-a-kind.
It’s interesting to note that this movie contains the only instance of Buster using a stunt double in his independent films. It turns out he couldn’t pole-vault through a second-story window and, not wanting to halt production while he took the time to learn, brought in an Olympic pole-vaulter as a wringer. For one shot in 11 features and 19 shorts, that’s not too shabby.
Warnings
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