College
(1927)
Directed by: Buster Keaton, James W. Horne
Writing credits: Carl Harbaugh, Bryan Foy
Starring: Buster Keaton, Anne Cornwall, Harold Goodwin, Snitz Edwards
Genre: comedy
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 66 minutes
Instrumentation List
Music composed by Timothy Brock (2016). Commissioned by the Orchestre National de Lyon, premiered January 19, 2017, conducted by the composer.
2 Flutes (2nd dbl. Picc.)
Oboe (dbl. E. horn)
2 Clarinets (2nd dbl. Bass-cl)
2 Alto Saxophones
Tenore Saxophone
Bassoon
2 Horns
2 Trumpets (in B-flat)
2 Trombones
Tuba
4 percussion (including timpani)
Piano (dbl. Celesta)
Harp
Strings (min. 8, 8, 6, 4, 2)
College by Michael Phillips - Chicago Tribune, April 2015
Buster Keaton is running in all directions at the moment. While the gravely beautiful and peerlessly graceful silent star wouldn't be caught dead shouting hip-hip-hooray, his fans can take care of that on his behalf. The movie is worth seeing for a lot of reasons, one of them being the weirdly elegant pratfall Keaton takes on the baseball diamond when he gets clipped by an opposing player sliding into third. At his high school graduation, bookish Ronald (Keaton) delivers a room-clearing speech decrying the emphasis on athletics in modern American life. His attitude proves unpopular. His sweetheart, Mary (Anne Cornwall), likes Ronald, but she has many suitors and is off to college, and wants her man to prove himself in the socially conventional ways.
So "College" goes, with Keaton's bookworm enrolling in Mary's school, working his way through by jerking sodas at a local drugstore and, in the one glaringly dated and discomfiting bit, donning blackface to apply as a "colored waiter." Essentially the film is a string of gags built around Buster learning baseball, track and field and, for the climax, how to be your own kind of coxswain on the college rowing team.The hugely satisfying payoff arrives in seeing Ronald put it all together for a one-man athletic competition, as he races to save Mary from the sexual blackmailing clutches of the campus wolf. Keaton made "College" as a topical box-office corrective to his great but unpopular Civil War epic, "The General."
In the vein of Harold Lloyd's massive hit "The Freshman," "College" depicts campus life and athletics as an initially horrifying prospect for our all-American hero. Clearly, Keaton was a very different sort of all-American comic than Lloyd was; who else in American silent film would dare cap a happy ending with a series of fade-outs sending Keaton and Cornwall all the way to their graves? ..."Anyone prefers an athlete to a weak-kneed teacher's pet," Ronald is told at one point. The not-so-hidden joke behind the visual jokes in "College" is that Keaton was so clearly an athlete himself — a protean, melancholy, inspiring all-American superstar answering to no other comic's style, concerns or persona.
