Squares at School

A movie that's been back on the FXM schedule for a little while is High Time. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Jan. 26) at 1:15 PM, and then again Monday at 11:35 AM.

Bing Crosby plays Harvey Howard, a widower with two adult children who made a fortune by opening up a chain of smokehouse restaurants selling hamburgers. That business precluded him from getting a college education, because he graduated in 1929 just before the Depression began and didn't have the money to go to school then, and once the business got started he had too much on his plate to get a liberal arts education and really didn't need it for the business anyway. But now that his wife's dead he's got the time to have the college experience he's always wanted, even though his children think it's a terrible idea.

Harvey, now 51, registers at Parkhurst University somewhere in North Carolina (based on some of the references, although other references imply a bunch of continuity problems) and, as an incoming freshman, gets put in a room with three other freshmen: Gil (Fabian, a teen idol singer of the day who got cast in several movies to try to lure in a teen audience); Bob (Richard Beymer, a year before West Side Story); and Sikh Indian T.J. (Patrick Adiarte, who is actually Filipino). The young ones are setting up a hi-fi system and dancing with the female companion Joy (Tuesday Weld), not realizing that this old guy is going to be one of their fellow classmates and roommates.

Of course, lots of people don't realize that Harvey is actually a non-traditional student at a time when apart from the GI Bill there weren't very many of them at residential colleges. This includes chemistry teacher and faculty advisor Prof. Thayer (Gavin MacLeod), the coach who runs the freshman requirement phys-ed class, the dean, and a French literature professor, Helene Gauthier (Nicole Maurey). She being older, like Harvey, you know that the two are going to wind up quasi-romantically involved, although it's a halting relationship that could get them in trouble since student/faculty romantic relations are a big no-no for good reasons.

Harvey tries to settle in and do all the things that other freshmen do, such as take part in the homecoming bonfire, or even join a fraternity, although he doesn't get to do the latter until sophomore year since the solons in the Greek organizations don't think a 51-year-old man really wants to be a member. It's not until his three roommates and friends join the same fraternity that they're able to get him in.

Overall, however, if you've seen any of the multitude of other college movies, you've seen the tropes that make up the bulk of High Time. That's not to say it's a bad movie per se so much as it is a product that's why out of its time. This seems to be Bing's idea of what college must have been like, ideas which seem stuck in the 1920 when Bing left college to make it big in entertainment in Los Angeles. Now, there's nothing wrong with being square; I've mentioned before how much I like Yours, Mine, and Ours for not really trying to fit in with the hip counterculture of the 1960s. But because High Time is treading familiar ground, it comes across as laughably wrong.

Still, High Time serves as an interesting time capsule. It's fun to compare with how different it is compared to college in more recent eras, as well as looking for the many continuity problems. There's swimming in a pond at October homecoming time while the same pond has a hard freeze in winter; Harvey's age is also way off -- as a member of the Class of 1960, he'd be 55 at the time of graduation, which means he would have been born in 1905 (in real life, Crosby was born in 1903), but as he says in the movie he graduated high school in 1929, which would have made him 24.

So maybe it's best not to think too much about High Time and just watch for the oddness of it all. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you'll have to catch the rare FXM showings.