That's My Boy

Richard Cromwell goes to college to get a lot of knowledge and become a doctor. When it turns out he's a great broken-field runner, football coach Douglass Dumbrille grooms him as next season's secret weapon. When he is unleashed, Cromwell is terrific, and gains national fame. Along the way he falls innocently in love with Dorothy Jordan, is schooled in the economics of college football by Leon Ames, and the unprofitable fleetness of fame by Ward Bond. There's also John Wayne as the entire Harvard football team, stunt casting of the 1931 USC Trojans -- they had won the championship that year -- plus Mae Marsh as Cromwell's mother and and an Robert Warwick as Miss Jordan's father, just to hammer the points home.

The copy of the movie I looked at last night on TCM was not in prime condition. That's a pity for any movie shot by Joseph August. Yet I could still see the appearance of the "Hero Portrait" lighting and shooting angle, not on the football field, but elsewhere, emphasizing the point that hero worship is a pose.

This movie takes a hard and cynical look at the big business of college football, and doesn't pull its punches, even as director Roy William Neill makes sure that all the plot points of juvenile romance, and thrills of college football are covered. In an era when college movies were about fun, games, and sexy co-eds, this dark example stands out from the crowd.

"That's My Boy" is a movie after my own heart. I'm a huge college football fan and the principal issue of the plot has everything to do with college football and student athletes.

The main character is Thomas Jefferson Scott (Richard Cromwell). He was a fine young man from the small city of Athens who wanted to go to college to become a doctor. When he got accepted to Thorpe University he found college life tough for no other reason than the cost. He was from meager means and college life was straining his pitiful budget.

He got a financial break when the varsity football coach, Coach Daisy Adams (Douglass Dumbrille), discovered him. Tom would be well taken care of so long as he could score touchdowns. They gave him the nickname of Snakehips Scott, which I found very unflattering. Snakehips is the nickname of a belly dancer, not a football player! In fact, there should never be any mention of the word "hips" in a football player's name.

I digress.

The real point of the movie, that Tom pointed out, was that College sports has been cashing in on young athletes since the turn of the century. Tom was determined to not go down that road. In fact, he delivered a poignant monologue when he was speaking to a Thorpe University booster (or something like that) named Al Williams (Leon Ames).

He said:

"A very fortunate thing happened to me last night Al. I had a look at myself five years from now. I was walking with a limp and working in an accounting office for $40 a week. Curly Decker (an ex-football player), that's what he earns--forty bucks a week and yet he made $6000 in New York during his summer vacation.

"Listen Al. I came here to be a doctor and I'm being sidetracked into something else. I'm being made to play football because I'm a big draw at the box office. I'm worth a million dollars a year to Thorpe, you told me that a thousand times. Alright, I'm worth a million dollars. Pay me some of it...

"College is just a big business, football's a racket. When they cheer you on the field and sing songs on the campus that's a lot of sentimental hooey. You taught me that.

"I'm being paid right now, that oil furnace job, and $6000 for doing nothing all summer. That's being paid, so it isn't that you object to professionalism is it?

"Look (as he opens a door to an accounting room). $350,000, all cash, and I'm responsible for it. Those are your own words.

"Here's my argument Al. You're taking away my chance to be a doctor. You're ruining my chance to do anything when I get outta here. It's worse to have been an ex-football star than to have been nothing at all and I wanna be paid for it. I'm worth a half-million dollars a year. Alright, pay me $250,000 for the next two years."

Tom's words reached right out of the screen and grabbed me by the collar. They were so true, so spot on, I couldn't believe that they'd been delivered over ninety years ago. Today many kids in college have NIL (Name Image Likeness) deals so that they get a piece of the billions-dollar pie that the NCAA and colleges make off of them. It was a long time coming. At least ninety years.

As much as I loved this movie for the actual plot, dialog, and situation Tom found himself in, I didn't even think Richard Cromwell was all that great. He was average, more or less, as an actor. I think he was helped tremendously by the script.

His being a football star affected his popularity, his academic trajectory, and his love life. He wanted to marry Dorothy Rogers (Dorothy Jordan), but her father disapproved. Her father, Steve Rogers (not to be confused with Captain America), played by Robert Warwick, was a steel magnate who knew that ex-football players were nothing once they left college and the spotlight. Tom wanted to disprove him while making sure that he wasn't going to be used up and thrown away by Thorpe U. He went through a real trial and I couldn't help but wonder whose biopic I was watching.

Free on Odnoklassniki.

Tommy (Richard Cromwell) is a young man who is going to Thorpe University to study medicine. But this changes when the coach sees him running...and insists the very slightly built Tommy join the football team. Soon, the 150 pounder is America's sweetheart...the envy of millions. And then, rather inexplicably, he becomes reviled...and then loved again!

Up until the last 15 or so minutes of the movie, this was a good film and kept my interest. But the final portion was filled with cliches, bad writing and an ending so ridiculous I even found myself yelling at the TV as I watched!! I'd say more but you should just see it yourself to see what I mean.

Is there much reason to watch this film? Well, if you are a John Wayne completist, it's one of his earliest movies and he plays what seems like every important position on the Harvard squad near the end of the movie. But he also never is given a line and only appears running various football plays. Otherwise...I'd avoid it.

This is really not a review, just a note that, amazingly, the third or fourth major role in this movie, and arguably the one that gets the best performance, is that of the heroine's father, but the actor is not listed in these credits. He is, of course, Robert Warwick, who had a long career and was still appearing on TV dramas in the early 1960s, when past 80. This is actually one of his best performances on film. It might also be noted that although it seemed a very long time before he was recognized as the excellent actor he was (mainly through John Ford) and was often playing little more than walk-ons all through the 1930s, Ward Bond, here seen at 29, is excellent in a single-but-telling scene as semi-washed up ex-football player who puts the Richard Cromwell character on to the way his college and football team are using him to feather their own nests while he gets nothing out of it. (Cromwell was limited, perhaps because of his ever-boyish looks, but gives a very credible performance here.) But one does wonder why it took until the late 1940s before Bond received recognition for the fine character actor he was and always had been.

The other review appearing here is very misleading, as John Wayne does not play a sportsman, but an athlete, in this film, has no lines that I could hear, and is simply in a few football scenes, none of them calling any kind of attention to him. If he wasn't identified in the credits, you wouldn't even know he'd been in it, ditto Buster Crabbe.