Brown of Harvard
by Jack Conway
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Product details
Director: Jack ConwayBrand: Critics Choice Video
Primary Contributor: William Haines
Primary Contributor: Mary Brian
Primary Contributor: Jack Pickford
Primary Contributor: John Wayne
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Unknown)
Running Time: 85 unknown-units
Published: 1996
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Publisher: Masterpiece Collection
Studio: Masterpiece Collection
VHS Movie Reviews of Brown of Harvard
Movie Review: Good college comedy/drama notable for early football footage - with John Wayne's first appearance
Summary: 4 Stars
I was intrigued to see this film for quite a while because of its ridiculously high average rating on the IMDb - it has the highest average as I write this of any silent film with a comparable or higher number of ratings - but it's not a film that is all that highly regarded by critics. Somehow, it seems to have developed a strange cult following. Was it due to the presence of John Wayne, in his very first film role? You'd think that with the Duke present - even if only in a walk-on extra role during the football sequence - there'd be more mainstream interest, and a DVD. Well, someday...
Anyway you can't always trust the ratings. This is actually a very solid film, preserved quite well if the transfer on the VHS I saw is any indication -- excellent acting by the principals, especially William Haines as Brown, and good location work at Cambridge with some fine action footage in the climactic Harvard/Yale football game -- but the story must have seemed a hoary chestnut even in 1926. Obnoxious, self-centered and charismatic Tom Brown (Haines) goes to school and gets put in his place, becoming in the process a caring, self-sacrificing friend, especially to Jim Doolittle (Jack Pickford - brother of the much more famous Mary); he becomes a star athlete - rower and football player. We get to see some excellent footage of Cambridge, MA as this was filmed on location, a rarity at the time, including a wonderful climactic football sequence (against Yale, natch) in which you'll see that future cowboy star I mentioned if you watch closely.
After a little reading up on it, I've figured out that the cult reputation the film has probably relies mostly on the figure of William Haines, not John Wayne. Haines was Hollywood's first openly gay film star, and he paid the price for it by having his career cut short in the mid-1930s. His other best-known film was SHOW PEOPLE with another cult star, Marion Davies, in 1928 - another film that seems to get an extraordinary amount of fan love. I don't get the craziness, but he is pretty darned magnetic as a screen presence.
I doubt people in 1926 found much that was really exciting in the last few reels - and, Haines "cult" or not, I'm not sure many people today will really thrill to the finish - the predictability factor is too high. Heck, even the name "Tom Brown" evokes the old British novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays", generations old when this was filmed. Still, it starts out very well, and is certainly deserving of being remembered, if not praised to the heavens.
Summary of Brown of Harvard
BROWN OF HARVARD Starring William Haines, Jack Pickford and Mary Brian July, 1926 While the mid-1920s were deluged with films about college life, and Brown of Harvard is probably the ultimate silent film in this genre, even more significantly it is an early example of the buddy film. Never mind the romance between Harvard undergrad Tom Brown (William Haines) and professor's daughter, Mary Abbott (Mary Brian) -- the real love story, and the one that truly moves the film's plot, is the one between the handsome, athletic Brown and his weakling sidekick Jim Doolittle (Jack Pickford) (in fact, the physical contrast between the two men is echoed in another important buddy film which came out some 40 years later -- Midnight Cowboy). The relationship between the two young men is established right from the beginning, when the brash and cocky Brown easily wins over his dormitory mates but refuses to let them ostracize Doolittle. Doolittle becomes Brown's biggest champion and their mutual loyalty is much more straightforward than Brown's pursuit of Mary, who can't decide whether she hates him, loves him, or prefers his stuffy rival, Bob MacAndrews (Francis X. Bushman, Jr.). Doolittle sticks by his pal when he loses the rowing competition against Yale, and later on risks his life by chasing after Brown in a pouring rainstorm to tell him that he hasn't been scratched from the football team after all.Movies most talked about in Video Genres
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