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Bookworm Ronald (Buster Keaton) has graduated high school top of his
class and now he goes to the same college as his love interest Mary (Ann
Cornwall) - but she claims to want an athlete as her boyfriend, so nerdy
Ronald tries himself in pretty much every sport, from baseball and
polevaulting to hurdling and high jump ... to miserable (yet often
hilarious) results. Ronald's dean (Snitz Edwards) can't help but notice
Ronald's miserable results in all his classes, but when he hears Ronald's
story, he sympathizes (since he has remained a bachelor because of not
excelling in athletics) and gives Ronald one last chance: He makes him
coxswain of the college's rowing team, with a big regatta only days away.
Of course, the rowing coach wants him off the team at any price, but his
attempt to drug him backfires when he accidently drugs his preferred
coxswain instead, and thus the team has to relie on Ronald for better or
worse. At first, everyh´thing seems to culminate in disaster, but when
the team's boat loses its rudder and Ronald becomes the boat's human
rudder, he not only saves the day but leads the team to victory. Having
won the regatta, Ronald thinks it would be easy to win Mary's heart - but
he doesn't find her amongst the race's audience and learns that presently,
college jock Jeff (Harold Goodwin) wants to force himself upon her in her
dorm room ... and so, Ronald rushes to the rescue, succeeding in pretty
much every sport along the way he has previously failed in, and of course,
ultimately Ronald manages to chase Jeff away, too, and in the end he gets
the girl. Buster Keaton's first film after the disappointing
initial box office performance of his masterpiece The
General, and the first feature he didn't direct himself (apart
from The Saphead) is also a major disappointment on a quality
level: From at least Our
Hospitality to The General,
Keaton and company have managed to cook up a simple plotline that would
tie up all of its crazy gags, stunts and setpieces to one comprehensive
and coherent narrative that worked like a clockwork. Not so in College,
where the basic premise is a mere hanger for unconnected gags along the
line things that can go wrong at sports, with its sequence being
rather deliberate, and only in the finale is an attempt made to tie
everything up - but unfortunately, this finale is not too well concieved
and not very funny. That all said, there are still some great gags in College,
and compared to other contemporary sapstick films, it might even be pretty
good - it's just not even in the same league as Keaton's best films.
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