Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

SnoopyStyle In California, Ronald (Buster Keaton) graduates from high school as he receives the honor medal. Jeff Brown is the popular star athlete who has spend 7 years in school. Ronald makes a speech on the 'Curse of the Athletics' that entrances the teacher but the only person left in the audience is his mother. He's infatuated with Mary Haynes and follows her to athletic centric Clayton college. The dean wants him to be a scholastic star but he keeps trying to be an athletic star to impress Mary.Keaton does do blackface in this but it's not deliberately offensive. If I have any problems with this, it's that I don't buy that Mary is worth the trouble. It's simply a given that she's a dreamgirl. Also Buster Keaton is a true athlete and he can't hide that in this movie. He looks more muscle bound that many of the athletes here. He can't do nerdy convincingly in a tank top. The story struggles to fit. There are some minor funny bits. The stunts are not really that big and mostly just silly slapstick.

robert-temple-1 This is an inferior Buster Keaton feature film. Considering how brilliant Keaton was, and how marvellous many of his feature films are, this one is a serious disappointment. I do not believe it would necessarily have been regarded that way when it came out, however. A lot of sport has flowed under the bridge since then. The film is primarily about Buster trying and failing at every conceivable sport (except football) which was common then at 'college' (the American term for university). Buster plays a bookish student who has contempt for sports but in order to try to win the heart of the girl he loves, tries to become a sportsman. In the days before sport was on television ad nauseam every single day, this would have had much more appeal than it has now. Sport historians of course would find this film fascinating, if there are any sport historians, that is. All the expected things happen: Buster tries the shot-put but cannot lift the shot and falls over under its weight, he tries the high jump but crashes into the rod, he tries the hurdles but knocks them all over, and so on. Considering that this film came between Buster's famous films THE GENERAL (1926) and STEAMBOAT BILL JR. (1928), it is remarkable that it lacks a fraction of the appeal of either of them. The DVD is good quality, with a well-restored print, so there are no quality complaints. The silent era was coming to an end, and what one can say in favour of COLLEGE is that it could never have succeeded at all in the sound era, so if Keaton really wanted to explore sports, it is just as well that he squeezed this film in just in time. It may be that other people will enjoy this film far more than myself, especially if they are fascinated by the subject, and there is no questioning the brilliance of Keaton's comic timing and technique, which are up to their usual standard. He also co-directed the film. Another reviewer has justly observed that this film resembles in theme the excellent film THE FRESHMAN (1925) by Harold Lloyd, which I would say is far more amusing than this one. These days when there are so many teen flicks about, the subject of kids going to 'college' and being 'freshmen' has little novelty, but in the twenties, it was all of great interest, especially to the dazed parents trying to understand their increasingly wild children, an anxiety clearly demonstrated by the film THE WILD PARTY (1929) starring Clara Bow in a film about girls going wild at college. People interested in seeing anything and everything that clever Buster Keaton did can, of course, not afford to miss this major film of his, as long as they are prepared to be bored by parts of it and wonder why he bothered making it.

ackstasis While this may seem a rather lightweight effort considering it came in the same year that produced 'The General (1927),' 'College' is an excellent little film in which Buster Keaton exploits the endless slapstick possibilities offered by sporting activities. Keaton plays Ronald, an unpopular bookworm whose public condemnation of athletics leads his girlfriend (Anne Cornwall) to dump him in favour of a more physically-capable jock (Harold Goodwin). In an attempt to win back the love of his life, Ronald enrolls himself in college and tries his hands at every sport in sight, with hilarious consequences. The two preceding sentences pretty much summarise the entire film. However, this inkling of a narrative is more than enough to open up a vast range of entertaining gags, and Keaton snatches a laugh at every opportunity.How do I begin to list my favourite moments from 'College?' Though some have complained of the repetitiveness of the sequence in which Keaton tries every athletics activity in the book, I thought it was the highlight of the film. The scenes follow a very strict comedic routine: first we see how it is supposed to be done, then we see Ronald's absurdly inept attempt. Wash, rinse, repeat; this time with a completely different sport. Of course the routine becomes somewhat predictable, but Buster Keaton is always the uncertain variable. We don't know how his next effort is going to fail, but we know it is, and that it's going to be a spectacular failure. Ronald is a hopeless case, but you can't deny that he's got heart. Whether he is being out-sprinted by a pair of young children, falling short of the long-jump sandpit, snapping a pole-vaulting stick in half or planting his face two feet underground after clearing the high-jump bar, he is always courageous enough to get up, brush himself off and try again.I've read that Harold Lloyd explored similar territory two years earlier with 'The Freshman (1925),' a film I haven't seen yet, so that one's probably a good film to look up if you, like me, enjoyed this one. It is also believed that there was originally a sequence showing Ronald's attempts to play American football, though this was ulimately cut to avoid comparisons with Lloyd's movie. Additionally, I was interested to read that Ronald's pole-vault through the window was one of the few times in Keaton's career that he didn't perform his own stunts. I'm certain that the danger-level was definitely not the problem {anybody who's seen 'Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)' will attest to that}, but pole-vaulting must have been one activity that he simply couldn't pull off. I don't blame him.

SofaKingFresh I am not a HUGE Buster Keaton fan. I am, however, beginning to like his movies more and more. Even though the emotion on his face doesn't change, he is still a pretty damn good actor. I bought this movie on DVD from the 99 cent store. I have seen his most famous movie (The General) and i must say that this movie entitled "College" is a lot better. Every single scene had great entertainment. Very well filmed for that time. This movie really made me see how times have changed. In the scene where he plays a black waiter is something that would never make it into a movie these days. The ending was really original. Lots of laughs and of course, his physical comedy was excellent as usual.