Get Yourself a College Girl

Hollywood tried to appeal to the youth demographic in the 1960s with a bunch of beach movies. Sometimes they tried to be original by moving the action from the sand to the snow, but that didn't necessarily make the movies any better. As an example, TCM is showing Get Yourself a College Girl tomorrow at 6:30 PM.

The Wyndham School for Girls has been teaching college-age girls refinement for a couple of generations now. One of the classes is teaching the young women ballet, led by one of the younger teachers, Miss Endicott (Joan O'Brien). Endicott suggests that the class' successful musical student, Terry Taylor (Mary Ann Mobley), put on a record for them to dance to, and Terry plays one of those anodynde uptempo things without lyrics that consistently came out of the radios in 1960s movies; the students dancing something that is definitely not ballet.

It's almost Christmas break, and the students go to a concert at the local club headlined by the Dave Clark Five as well as Eric Burdon and the Animals, both at the beginning of their careers not wasting one of their hit songs on a movie like this. Meanwhile, back on campus, the dean, Martha Stone, gets a call from a Gary Underwood (Chad Everett). Gary, it turns out, is a music publisher, and he's been publishing songs that Terry wrote, under a pseudonym. Gary wants to get in touch with Terry, even though she gave him strict instructions not to get in touch with anybody from Wyndham.

And that's with good reason, because Terry's songs like "Get Yourself a College Girl" are the sort of thing that's going to scandalize the trustees of the school, including the original Wyndham's grandson, Hubert Morrison (Willard Waterman), who is a senator facing a tough reelection bid. He thinks the scandal could sink him, but Dean Stone is more sympathetic. So a compromise is reached with Terry and her friends: Sue Anne (Chris Noel) and Lynne (Nancy Sinatra) going off to Sun Valley for the holidays chaperoned by Miss Endicott, not to have any relationship with boys.

Senator Morrison heads off to Sun Valley as well to investigate for himself. But also going there is Gary, who wants to see Terry and handle the PR for the new song. To that end, he's brought along an artist, Armand, whose job it's going to be to get a painting of Terry in just a bikini for the advertising. Really. Talk about scandal. But at least Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto show up in Sun Valley to do "The Girl from Ipanema".

If that plot isn't inane enough, just wait. After the misunderstandings in Sun Valley are cleared up, there's still the question of Senator Morrison's campaign. He now sides with the youth, and decides to have a "Checkers speech"-like TV appearance in which he's going to appear with the kids and music acts of the day, hoping to get enough calls from the young to continue the campaign. It makes no sense whatsoever.

The highlight of Get Yourself a College Girl is some of the musical numbers. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the Animals and Dave Clark don't sing the songs you've heard of, but at least Astrud Gilberto does. There's also a jazz combo up in Sun Valley I hadn't heard of called the Jimmy Smith Trio who are pretty good. But the plot is ridiculous. If you enjoy having a laugh at the stupidity of truly dumb plots, you'll probably have some fun with Get Yourself a College Girl. But there's not much other reason to watch it.