Young Ideas

It's too bad that Herbert Marshall was not a professor of English literature as opposed to physics. If he had been he'd have recognized Othello in the scheme that Susan Peters and Elliott Reid had to break up the marriage between their mother Mary Astor and Marshall.

In Young Ideas Peters and Reid are caught off guard with the whirlwind courtship and sudden marriage of Astor to Marshall. Also caught off guard is Astor's literary agent Allyn Joslyn who cancels the book tour he has for his client.

Peters and Reid decide they don't like Marshall and are determined to break up the marriage. What they hit upon as a tactic is to convince Marshall that some of the spicy characters that Astor uses in her novels are autobiographical glimpses of her own racy life. Later on when Joslyn and a French friend from Europe George Dolenz come, courtesy of Peters and Reid, Marshall's suspicions are confirmed.

It's partially Marshall's own fault. He insists that she retire and be a homemaker and he will support them on his college salary. Kind of narrowminded I thought and I couldn't quite grasp Astor going along with him. This film could never be made today. Besides what would be wrong with Astor writing in her spare time and bringing in the bucks?

George Dolenz was an interesting character. He was so obviously gay, but that was not spoken of in those days. How Marshall considered him a threat is beyond me.

Later on Peters relents as she falls for English instructor Richard Carlson. Reid however is a spoiled kid and he doesn't relent until almost the end.

Young Ideas isn't all that young with Peters and Reid playing Iago to the hilt. Still it's a pleasant and entertaining comedy showing off a number of MGM's young female contract players as coeds. Look sharp and you'll see Ava Gardner in the crowd. Good, but dated viewing.

When Mary Astor's racy memoirs about life in pre-war Paris hits he best-seller charts, she goes on the lecture circuit. Then she drops off it to marry small-town-college professor Herbert Marshall. Her college-age children, Susan Peters and Elliott Reid move in and conspire to break up the marriage so they can go back to New York.

It's a thoroughly blah MGM programmer, a step up from the Andy Hardy series. It's also very distressing: Marshall and Miss Astor, great performers in pre-code movies, reduced to Code-compliant, sniggering, sex-less sex comedy! Stars and MGM had certainly fallen on artistic hard times.

It is, of course, beautifully produced, directed by Jules Dassin while he was still working off his apprenticeship, and shot in bright, flat light by Charles Lawton, Jr. The competence in service of such piffle makes it even more galling.

YOUNG IDEAS strains to be a smart screwball comedy but early on it becomes apparent that this is strictly a trivial bit of fluff designed to showcase some new talent in a cast headed by two older reliables: MARY ASTOR and HERBERT MARSHALL. Astor is fine but Herbert Marshall is painfully bad in a couple of his "comic" scenes. He was much more suited to dramatic roles.

Astor went on record in later years saying that she regretted signing with MGM when all they did was cast her in mother roles in some less than distinguished films. This is one of them.

SUSAN PETERS and ELLIOT REID are her children with "young ideas" who decide to spoil her marriage to Herbert Marshall by making him believe her risqué books were really autobiographical in nature. It's all on the "cute" side and very predictable, although there's nothing terribly wrong with the performances.

RICHARD CARLSON, ALLYN JOSLYN and GEORGE DOLENZ provide some good support but it's simply not worth their combined efforts.

Under Jules Dassin's direction, it passes the time quickly in one hour and seventeen minutes, but is obviously just designed to showcase up and coming new talent like Susan Peters and Elliot Reid. Not long after this film, Susan had the hunting accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down, a tragic end to a brief career in the limelight.

"Young Ideas" is supposed to be a quirky comedy but it really annoyed me because so many people in the film were utterly selfish jerks. A comedy should NOT annoy the viewer.

The film begins with Jo Evans (Mary Astor) becoming a number one best selling author. Then, because she's fallen in love, she completely abandons her book tour--telling no one and simply not showing up for her book signings and lectures. Jerk.

You then meet Jo's kids--and they haven't fallen far from the proverbial tree. When these grown children learn that their mother has married and doesn't plan on writing any more, they are NOT happy for her and her new husband. Instead, they're only concerned that their free lunch (so to speak) might be coming to an end. So, they decide the best course of action is to try to destroy the marriage!

What is with these people and WHY is this considered funny? The only one I ended up caring about and feeling for was the man Jo married-- the Professor (Herbert Marshall). Again and again, her kids lie to him--telling him that the crazy characters in Jo's books are autobiographical AND contacting her old boyfriends and arranging for them to just 'drop by'.

Overall, this is a comedy with few laughs and is so mean-spirited and full of selfish people that it completely took me out of the story. I hated this film despite some good acting.

Mary Astor and Herbert Marshall are together again! This time, instead of a tense marriage as in Woman Against Woman, they're in a, well, tense marriage. However, it's for entirely different reasons, and Young Ideas is hilarious from start to finish.

Mary, a celebrated novelist, elopes with Herbert, a stuffy professor, much to the chagrin of her publicist, Allyn Joslyn, and her grown-up children, Elliott Reid and Susan Peters. Incidentally, this is Elliott's second film, his first being a documentary, and he doesn't seem like a novice at all! He practically carries the movie, since the two children are arguably the leads, and his energy and enthusiasm are adorable. Together, it's three against two, and Mary and Herbert find their marriage threatened by outside forces. The children enroll in Herbert's university to make it seem like they're playing nice, but secretly they devise all sorts of schemes to ruin his career and romance. When Susan falls in love with one of her teachers, Richard Carlson, she starts to understand how important love is.

Young Ideas is so funny, you have to watch it. Herbert gets to let his hair down in a hilarious drunk scene where he challenges Allyn to a drinking contest, then ends up playing in the nightclub's jazz band, screaming "Go Tigers!" and walking a weaving line as his students cheer him on. Mary is a wonderful love interest for him, mature, pretty, sophisticated, and sincere. If there's anyone who can convince her children she's a human as well as a mother, it's Mary. Richard Carlson is a handsome bonus to the film; since his career didn't take off as much as it could have, I always like seeing him in the movies he did make. Rent this adorable youngsters vs. oldsters comedy. I know you'll laugh.