Ruby Keeler teams with the Nelsons (of TV and radio fame) as the singer in Ozzie's band. The setting is a college campus which is suffering from monetary woes, but somehow Ozzie's band manages to attract enough attention to increase the enrollment and keep the school from having to shut down.
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Ruby Keeler comes back for one last starring appearance to basically introduce the married showbiz couple Ozzie Nelson & Harriet Nelson who would later go on to be a bigger hit on radio and television than the silver screen with their longstanding TV-show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Sweetheart of the Campus (1941) however is a low budget musical which doesn't go anywhere. A sad farewell to Keeler.
Ozzie, Harriet, and Ruby Keeler lead an entire college campus comprised of students pushing 40 as they put on a variety show to try to raise enrollment rates to prevent their school from closing. Sincere and goofy and with just enough placidly pleasant musical numbers to remain watchable without ever being compelling as anything but a cultural document of the state of the art of anodyne entertainment in 1941.
Ok, Ozzie and Harriet, I expected more from you.
Similar to more recent MTV teen movies, Sweetheart of the Campus is more about the music video appeal than having a story or characters.
May have been better as a musical vs a movie with music.
There was something winningly gauche about Ruby Keeler, performing her tap numbers without panache but with plenty of gusto. In her last film before retirement, she stars with Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, before they became an American TV fixture as Ozzie and Harriet). It's a hapless musical set in a failing all-male college where Ruby becomes the only female student. That's 32-year-old Ruby Keeler, who had been sweetly hoofing in pictures for over a decade, playing a sassy co-ed. The movies have always traded on fantasy.
The amateurish refrain of "Let's put the show on right here!" has here been adapted by the screenwriters into an equally amateurish "Let's write the script right here!" The inconsequential words, indifferently performed,…
Ruby Keeler's last vehicle. A low budget campus musical comedy directed by a rather mismatched Edward Dmytryk. Some likable performers and moments of energy but this all rather uninspired and routine.
I'm not really one to judge musicals or tap dancing but my take-away from this is that the young people are callous assholes in this. Yeah, that old broad was mean and all, but when she slipped on the barbell and fell over they all laughed at her (and even played mocking walk-out music). That old lady could have been seriously hurt by that fall and they just laughed! So my sympathy for these young vagrants to 'just have fun' went out the window and I wanted that old bat to shut them down and get her property back.
Nice to see Ruby Keeler playing an adult, not a simpering naive stage-struck kid. She knows the ropes in this pic, and she's learned to stand up a bit straighter when she taps. Pretty sure they dubbed her singing voice here.
Harriet Hilliard (Nelson) though... man, I can't believe she was a professional band singer. I did not care for her voice at all. And it was kind of hard to accept Ozzie and Harriet as cool hep-cats.
