William “Wild Bill” Wellman’s College Coach is a bona fide piece of work — and not in a good way. It’s an exceedingly strange comedy about a college whose trustees decide that they can save the school from financial ruin only by perking up its loser football program by hiring a notoriously shady, publicity-hound coach-to-the-highest-bidder, and eventually building a bigger football stadium to rake in the bigger receipts. Coach Gore (Pat O’Brien) is unscrupulous to the bone, but a proven winner. He immediately hires four “mercenaries,” itinerant semi-pro players who make their livings posing as students at the various colleges that hire them. Everything that Gore does is immoral, no matter how you look at it. He hires mercenaries (and he is, of course, Mercenary #1 himself) and helps them cheat on tests to maintain their academic eligibility. He secretly buys the land on which the new stadium is to be built, insuring a healthy personal profit — enlisting one of the trustees to conspire with him. Like a gang boss, he encourages his team to injure the big rival school’s star player so he’ll have to be carried off the field from a game they would otherwise lose. He neglects his wife until she finds comfort in the affections of an idiot jock football star, Buck Weaver (Lyle Talbot); he promises to attend to her needs, but in fact always begs off. And the worst sin of all may be against the football gods: he does not discipline the egotistical knucklehead star, Weaver, when he subverts his offense’s play-call. (The call is for a pass to the morally upright, and wide open, receiver Phil Sargent [Dick Powell], but the glory-hound Weaver runs it himself for a touchdown.) Unlike every other story of a corrupt sportsperson made under the Hollywood sun, Coach Gore never gets a comeuppance. He’s a bad guy. He cuts all the corners. He’s basically a cheater and a bully. He’s not even charming. But he’s a winner. Jesus loves a winner!
I say that Coach Gore is immoral, not simply amoral, because the film makes it clear from beginning to end that there are morally correct alternatives and Gore consciously rejects them. And so does the film itself, all while maintaining the tone that we’re watching an “honesty is always the best policy” story that will restore moral balance in the end. It doesn’t come close. It begins with the debate among the trustees about whether wagering the college’s future on football is a betrayal of a university’s sacred mission. The deciding argument comes by way of an amazing big-screen television — in 1933!
Watching College Coach is a bit like watching the Nazi romances that Manuel Puig describes in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, which use all the Hollywood techniques of audience immersion and identification with romantic characters, but in the unembarrassed service of evil. All those handsome, manly, civilized German officers and their glamorous, urbane paramours aligned against the ugly parasitical Jew saboteurs. In College Coach it’s not Nazism but toxic masculinity that wins in the end — and looking back, there never was a real battle. In the world of Real Men, decency, fairness, and playing by the rules are for losers and sissies. The problem is that the film uses all the techniques of a moralizing movie to tell the opposite story.
Dick Powell’s Phil Sargent is — or rather, should be — the good-guy counterforce. He forcefully stands up to Buck and defends the code of fair play. He’s an industrious, curious student, he thinks reflectively about a future career in chemical engineering, and he quits the team to devote his time in college to study. He’s a strong football player (though he’s given very little screen time on the field), and also the sensitive artistic type. Powell gets to croon an okay little Sammy Fain-Irving Kahal tune, “Lonely Lane,” to show his romantic depths. Then Buck arrives (Coach Gore has decided Buck and Phil are so hostile to each other they should room together) and delivers a straightforward homophobic sneer: “If only you could cook.” Nothing in the film really counters this yahoo homophobia. Phil doesn’t have a romantic role or even a girlfriend — a very unusual situation for Powell, who in 1933 was beginning his young career as one of the most popular romantic juveniles in Hollywood. I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that Powell made 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 in the same year as College Coach, and for the same studio. He has top billing in College Coach but relatively little screen time and his character has virtually no influence on the action.
Despite the prominence in billing, Powell isn’t the star here, it’s O’Brien. He’s not yet the streetwise Irish tough guy with a heart of gold that he plays for much of his film career. (He plays a more endearing and marginally more honest fast-talking con-man opposite Powell in Twenty Million Sweethearts the following year.) Wellman and the film’s editors didn’t know what to do with O’Brien’s character. Here’s a characteristically schizophrenic sequence of scenes. At first, Coach Gore and his wife Claire (Ann Dvorak) are about to hunker down to the romantic evening at home that he has promised her many times. Note the tender musical underscore, a clear signal to the audience that we can expect a sweet moment. O’Brien is positively tender. The phone rings, and Coach is off to persuade one of his ringers, an East European immigrant blockhead, not to quit after he has received a better offer — more money and a car — from another university. (Note that Coach snidely calls him a “Little Eva” for wanting to quit, another homophobic wisecrack.) Coach is positively shocked, like Casablanca‘s Capt. Renault, that his merc would accept money from a school infamous for its checks bouncing. The romantic evening has gone kaput, as it apparently always does with Coach. There’s nothing to suture the moods of these scenes together. The message is that this movie is for real men. Business comes first, maybe especially when one’s business is bullying and grifting. The score cheats the audience the same way that Coach cheats his wife.
The in-game scenes are fun to watch, and the contemporary (male) audience of this football-crazy period of US culture may have seen things we no longer see. By 1933, collegiate football (which was the main stage of the sport) was already pass-happy, and pass plays came to represent team-work. The choice of the glory-hog Buck to eschew the called-for pass play to Phil in order to run it himself without telling his teammates probably would have been considered a vulgar move in the real world of the sport. Coach Gore declares “Next time that guy busts a signal I’m gonna bust a bench over his head.” Well, Buck does it again in the big game, and Coach has no problem with it then, either. The sportscaster tells it straight up: “The crowd loves touchdowns.”
The strange marginalization of Phil and the good he represents comes into sharp relief in a scene with his favorite chemistry professor, the milquetoast Professor Trask (Donald Meek). The professor has been fired to save the college money. The only way he can be reinstated is if the college beats its big rival in The Big Game (when I guess more money will flow to the university coffers). Phil is badly disappointed, but doesn’t question why a teacher’s job should depend on football success. He’ll save his beloved professor’s job, his own aspirations, and “everything a university’s supposed to stand for” by returning to the team to help Calvert College win The Game. So, the corruption of the mission of the university by the football program can only be corrected by winning at football. That may be an accurate story of the real world, and low-hanging fruit for satire, but in College Coach it’s played straight as little hero story.
The climactic Big Game is pretty anticlimactic, as it happens. Calvert needs a big win, if only to save Prof. Trask’s job (and thereby the sacred mission of the university) and Coach’s reputation. From the bench, Coach actually does no coaching. Phil is calling the plays in the huddle with no input from him. Phil calls the same play that Buck hogged earlier in the film and the whole shebang is repeated: Buck doesn’t pass the ball to Phil, Buck has a great run for a touchdown, he does his silly self-congratulatory touchdown display, Calvert wins the game, and Coach is reunited with Claire. Even the wimp Prof. Trask becomes a football fan, now that the game has saved his academic life.
The tough-guy cynicism that runs throughout College Coach is pretty astounding — not even the gangster films popular at the same time were so brazen. Some of Wellman’s defenders have tried to frame the film as a satire about the scandalous state of college sports at the time. Its appearance a year before the Hays Code was seriously implemented has led some to see its amorality as a middle finger raised to the Code’s decency-must-win-out-in-every-situation requirement. The film’s defenders may have a point. Wellman made some brilliant comedies about unscrupulous characters — Nothing Sacred and Roxie Hart among them. Maybe Coach Gore was supposed to be one of those harmless borderline hucksters played so often by Lee Tracy (and O’Brien himself in Twenty Million Sweethearts). Maybe Powell’s role was supposed to be more central. Maybe the film wasn’t supposed to be so cynical. If so, maybe the film is morally incompetent and not straight-up immoral; and that may be because it’s cinematically incompetent. There’s no getting around the fact that the sleazy characters play the game and win out, while the good sit on the sidelines.
I don’t know how well known the film was in later years, but one film in particular, Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal, seems to take it head-on. Made in 1942, The Male Animal uses many of the same plot points as College Coach, but from the wimpy professorial perspective: an Ohio State-like college that views football as its mission and suspects its intellectuals of not being real American men (effeminate in College Coach, Communists in Male Animal); corrupt trustees; a professor viewed as unmanly, with a wife who leaves him temporarily for a knucklehead jock; a Phil Sargent-like devoted student. The values are reversed, however. Nugent’s story sees football-mania as a precursor to enthusiasm for fascism and violent nativism — its corruption goes beyond money to bigotry and authoritarianism. True manhood, Nugent’s film says, lies in sticking up for fairness against power. The Male Animal is downright moralistic, but I prefer that to moral incompetence and cynicism.
If College Coach were a more competent film, it would be interesting as a document of masculinist bullshit in early 1930s Hollywood. As it is, it’s not even interesting.