All-American Co-Ed (1941)

Time hasn’t been very kind to this rather weak comedy. The prim “Auntie” (Esther Dale) runs an elite girls’ school but it’s running out of pupils and the students she does have are getting a bit restless for some contact with boys. “Auntie, a woman doesn’t want to live with a mind, she wants to live with an husband!”. The nearby boys’ college of “Quinceton” isn’t faring very much better, and they are also fed up being ridiculed by the girls, so they come up with a wheeze to scandalise the place and duly elect “Bob” (Johnny Downs) to infiltrate the heart of their rival’s school. Dressed as a girl! His sabotage mission is compromised quite swiftly when he meets “Virginia” (Frances Langford) whom he is supposed to be targeting, but whom - well you can guess. The path of true love never runs smooth and when his mates discover all isn’t exactly going to plan, they hit on an idea to send “reinforcements” - so disaster for just about everyone now looms! This has clearly been produced on a shoe-string budget with some pretty poor editing and even more obvious studio backdrops, but at least Langford can hold a tune for the few numbers that pepper this otherwise really quite cringey enterprise and Kent Rogers isn’t bad at telling us just how Gary Cooper might have dealt with their crises. Downs has a certain degree of charisma, in a boy-next-door sort of fashion, but here he just lurches from one silly scenario to another and the idea that anyone could ever have mistaken him for a girl is pretty preposterous. It’s short and inoffensive, but those aren’t really reasons to watch it.