Pigskin Parade is a pretty famous movie, considering that it’s not much to look at. It was Judy Garland’s first major role, and she does indeed kill the three numbers she has. Directed by David Butler, a prolific, experienced, uneven contract director at 20th Century Fox, it’s one of the dozens of college comedies of the period. The story could have been funny: the Yale football team needs to compete against teams other than their usual rivals, preferably a school from the west. They decide on the University of Texas, but a clerk mistakenly provides the address of a certain Texas State, a small school with a brand-new, barely competent football coach. (Today’s Texas State did not technically exist yet in 1936.) When their star player is injured (getting tackled by the coach’s comic wife), they cross into Arkansas to find a replacement. There they happen upon a hillbilly farmer who can throw watermelons a long way, with accuracy, but who knows nothing about sports. The hayseed (played by Stuart Erwin) is sneakily enrolled, as is his little sister (played by Judy Garland). When the great game arrives there’s a blizzard in New Haven. Hayseed Amos wins the game playing barefoot (as is his custom at home), not with his passing, but a monster run in the last possible play. The end.
It’s very unpretentious and breezy. The stereotyping of Ozark hicks is as broad as most contemporary films’ depictions of African-Americans. (Inexplicably, Erwin was nominated for a best-supporting Oscar for a performance that depends mainly on aw shucks tarnation Li’l Abner dialect.) It’s as B a movie as B can be.
But it has its moments. There’s a cute song — Sidney Mitchell and Lew Pollack’s “You’re Slightly Terrific” — sung by Tony Martin, with a fine little dance routine by Dixie Dunbar that’s (imo) much more tasteful than anything done by Ruby Keeler or Eleanor Powell. And as always the Fox studio orchestra is sweet.
The Fox B-musicals often had insipid stories with inventive music. When the coach’s wife (played by Bessie Winters), who is the real brains behind the football program, and Head Student Chip Carson (played by Johnny Downs), arrive in the hinterlands of Arkansas they are met by a cretinous young hick whose only gift appears to be playing the mouth harp. I’m pretty sure it’s introduced as the kind of comic hillbilly-bashing that became so sinister in Deliverance — but when it picks up steam it has the opposite effect, to me at least. The kid (played by Robert McClung) offers to play a traditional Appalachian harp tune, “The Fox Chase,” and it sounds pretty authentic to me. McClung appeared in several movies as a country harmonica player and apparently had a solid reputation among his harp-playing peers.
The comedy singing group known as The Yacht Club Boys has a few unremarkable routines — but there’s one I really like, “Down With Everything.” Conning a new student who aspires to be a Communist agitator into throwing a brick through a bank window (it’s complicated: they want him locked in the hoosegow long enough for them to use his enrollment certificate for Amos, to make him seem eligible), they sing a funny parody of an agitation song. It has shades of Tom Lehrer before the fact. I can’t find the lyrics online, but they’re pretty easy to figure out. It makes fun of “the faction” as only folks with experience of it can.
I’m not a fan of Judy Garland’s. I acknowledge her great talent, I just don’t like the excessive theatricality of her style, which is one of the things that most people love about her. Most of her songs in Pigskin Parade aren’t very good — the music is generally subpar for a Fox musical — but she does a rousing version of “It’s Love I’m After,” a Mitchell-Pollack tune that had some staying power. But as often was the case with Garland’s movie songs, the set-up is over the top.
