She's Working Her Way Through College

She's Working Her Way Through College is a 1952 American comedy film produced by Warner Bros. A musical comedy in Technicolor, it was directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, and starred Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan. The on-screen credit reads “Adapted from a stage play by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent“. The unnamed play is the authors' First Amendment comedy/drama, The Male Animal, which was adapted into a film by the same name in 1942.[1]

She's Working Her Way Through College
Theatrical release poster
Directed byH. Bruce Humberstone
Produced byWilliam Jacobs
Screenplay byPeter Milne
Based onThe Male Animal (1940 play)
by Elliott Nugent
James Thurber
StarringVirginia Mayo
Ronald Reagan
Gene Nelson
Music byRay Heindorf
CinematographyWilfred M. Cline
Edited byClarence Kolster
Production
company
Distributed byWarner Bros.
Release date
July 12, 1952 (1952-07-12)
Running time
104 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Gene Nelson and Virginia Mayo

Plot

Angela Gardner (Virginia Mayo) is a burlesque star known as Hot Garters Gertie. She started working as an exotic dancer solely to earn money for a college education. She wants to be a writer, and has been working on a play for many years. She decides to enroll in Midwest State, where her former high school teacher, John Palmer (Ronald Reagan), is now Professor of English.

There is a longstanding rivalry, going back to their own college days, between Palmer and onetime college football jock Shep Slade (Don DeFore), who is still fond of Palmer's wife, Helen (Phyllis Thaxter). With the help of fellow student Don Weston (Gene Nelson) and despite interference from the jealous Poison Ivy Williams (Patrice Wymore), Angela succeeds in her studies, and Palmer suggests that she turn her play into a musical. When the Theatrical Arts class votes to do a musical instead of the usual work by Shakespeare, Angela's play is a natural.

Angela has kept her past in burlesque a secret, and when Ivy exposes that past in the college newspaper, Board of Trustees Chairman Fred Copeland (Roland Winters), who once tried to seduce Hot Garters Gertie, demands that Palmer expel her. Palmer defies him and instead defends Angela's right—indeed, everyone's right—to an education, in front of the whole school.

Cast

Reception

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times declared that the best thing in the film was Gene Nelson's gymnastics-dance number. He warned his readers that if they looked closely they would realize that the unnamed play in the opening credits “is none other than those authors' vastly humorous and neatly trenchant The Male Animal... (The) Warner boys have so rearranged and watered down the plot of the original that the resemblance is blissfully remote...And where Mr. Thurber and Mr. Nugent made the fate of their hero turn upon his daring to read a letter by Bartholomew Vanzetti to his English class, Mr. Milne has worked up a crisis over the rights of the little lady to stay in school... But, plainly, the stubborn endeavor to weave a musical story line into the stout fabric of The Male Animal—and such a silly musical story line, at that—has resulted in a combination that does credit to neither one. The musical story is routine...the play has been woefully stripped of humor, pertinence and sting. Bruce Humberstone, who directed, must have felt himself working on mud”.[1]

In his afterword to TCM's June 2020 airing of the film, Dave Karger[2] observed that in 1952, a production using the plot of the original play and the 1942 film adaptation would have been impossible, because Hollywood was in the grips of the Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era.

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References
  1. Crowther, Bosley (1952-07-10). "THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; ' She's Working Her Way Through College,' With Virginia Mayo, New Bill at Paramount". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-13.
  2. "Dave Karger". Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved 2020-06-13.
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