What the movie did have going for it was recent Academy Award-winner Young (for The Farmer's Daughter, 1947), completing her third decade in Hollywood (having made her debut in silent films at the age of four), and freckle-faced All-American Van Johnson, a major heartthrob of the 1940s. It also had direction by Lloyd Bacon, one of the workhorses in the Warner Bros. roster of the 1930s, a versatile if relatively commonplace director who could handle musicals, comedies, dramas and action pictures with equal facility. It also has a soundtrack of standards, including "It Had to Be You," Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump," "Dream" by Johnny Mercer and that old Stephen Foster warhorse (lots of horses in this picture!) "Beautiful Dreamer." Starring as Young's college-aged daughter (and rival for Johnson's affections) is Betty Lynn, known later as Barney Fife's sweetheart Thelma Lou on TV's The Andy Griffith Show.
At a time when many female stars refused to play mothers of grown children, Young is to be commended for taking on the role at only 36. This was a big year at 20th Century-Fox for grown-ups in a campus setting. Besides Young as a student in this film and Fred MacMurray as a football coach in Father Was a Fullback, Clifton Webb reprised his popular "governess" role in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College. The three movies even had very similar posters. The film was enough of a hit that Raphael Blau, who wrote the unpublished story on which it was based, was inspired to turn it into an unproduced stage play. Young reprised her role on radio twice, once in a 60-minute adaptation for Lux Radio Theater, co-starring Johnson, and again in a truncated Screen Directors Playhouse broadcast in 1951.
By Rob Nixon
