The Sport Parade

Bill Gargan and Joel McCrea are a pair of former college athletes now sportswriters. They have a friendship which is put severely to the test over a woman, Marian Marsh. When it founders, McCrea takes up pro-wrestling and goes to work for crooked promoter Walter Catlett.

As the old saying goes when you lie down with dogs you come up with fleas. It's guilt by association for our intrepid hero and McCrea has to save his reputation.

Joel McCrea is probably the most moral decent hero the cinema ever produced. But his persona in the wrong director's hands and a bad script, he can venture over into Dudley Doo-Right territory. Unfortunately he does that here.

But if you want to see Joel McCrea stripped to the waist in his twenties than you have some incentive to see this movie.

Having worked for Yale Athletics for 25 years I can say without fear of contradiction that the football game shown was not being played at Harvard Stadium but rather Yale Bowl. Having seen countless games at both venues, this is a definite fact.

... and I mean both the figurative and literal scenery here. I started watching this because I'm a big fan of Joel McCrea, but ten minutes into it and the corny collegiate "contact" business between Dartmouth buddies Sandy Brown (Joel McCrea) and Johnny Baker (William Gargan) and I was rolling my eyes and thinking about hitting the erase button on the DVR. I'm glad I resisted the urge. Although the major plot themes are paint by numbers - big college sports stars are often wash outs after graduation, two best friends in love with the same beautiful girl, and with even the grasshopper and the ant fable thrown in for good measure, there are some things worth catching here.

For one, the cast of supporting characters is great. There's Walter Catlett as a seedy agent, which is rich if you think about it since even though seedy was Catlett's on-screen trademark, in real life there was never a sweeter and more generous guy to a literal fault than he. Then there's Skeets Gallagher as a drunken newspaper photographer who either misses the photo or defocuses the lens due to his constant state of intoxication, yet manages to get the photo of a lifetime. Finally there's the splendid cameo appearance of Robert Benchley as an unnamed radio announcer with his trademark droll dry humor. He covers sports events and manages to get things completely wrong - even as to whether or not there is actually a band playing at a football game.

Also look for a shot of a Cotton Club-like night club with a couple of numbers featuring an all African American cast - an odd sidetrack in a movie that is - if it is about anything - is certainly not about nightclubs.

Finally, the homo erotic angle that is always played up in this film - William Gargan popping Joel McCrea with a towel in a shower after a football game, is really overshadowed by an anonymous gay couple as spectators at the fights complaining of the savagery of the event and leaving in disgust. Stereotypical - absolutely - but certainly an example of what would not be possible just two years later under the production code.

A point of interest - one of the few times William Gargan did get the girl in a film was a year later when he made "Headline Shooter" ... with Joel McCrea's actual wife, Frances Dee.

It is, after all, a very Hawksian landscape -- men's men, sports, best friends vying for the same woman, a vague homoeroticism beneath. (The film historian Richard Barrios has suggested it's a heavily disguised gay fantasy, with Marian Marsh there just for convention's sake.) But Dudley Murphy, with David Selznick's blessing, goes in for terrible artsy cinematic transitions, needlessly elaborate camera-work, and an odd obsession with Harlemites (a pseudo-Cotton Club sequence that makes for highly uncomfortable viewing today). You do get the appeal of the young Joel McCrea, one of the most unassuming and likable of leading men, and there are nice, seemingly improvised bits by Robert Benchley, doing sportscaster variations on his famed "Treasurer's Report" routine. Walter Catlett pitches in, too, playing a sort of sub-Don King with his well-practiced brand of cynicism and breathless delivery. But the pacing's sluggish for an under-70-minute programmer, and the happy ending's awfully forced: Aside from the inexplicably quashed romantic rivalry, wouldn't a sequel show the mob gunning down McCrea for not throwing the fight?

"The Sport Parade" is strictly a quick B-movie and since Joel McCrea was pretty new to the film industry, it's not surprising he made a few cheapo films.

When the story begins, Sandy Brown (McCrea) and Johnny Baker (William Gargan) are star athletes at Dartmoth. They are multi- sport heroes and their future looks grand. Johnny dreams of working for a newspaper and Sandy simply wants to get rich. What follows is a Horatio Alger-type story where Sandy eventually learns that his way is not the healthy way...and he repeatedly makes an idiot of himself until he eventually does the right thing.

Overall, a mildly interesting film...at best. About the only interesting things that stand out are seeing McCrea and seeing a lot of male skin, as it's a pre-code film and titillation was big back in the day.