College Confidential (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 21, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
-
Director
Albert ZugsmithRelease Date(s)
1960 (March 18, 2025)Studio(s)
Universal-International (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: D
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Until the ascent of Irwin Allen, Albert Zugsmith was Hollywood’s most alarmingly tasteless film producer. During his brief tenure at Universal-International, Zugsmith was assigned various projects, a handful of which became classics, including Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, and Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. But Zugsmith was mostly hands-off on those pictures, and their directors were not exactly enamored of Zugsmith’s abilities.
He’s better-remembered (if that’s the right term) for the movies he both produced and often directed (and co-wrote) on his own, immediately after: High School Confidential! (1958), The Beat Generation (1959), Sex Kittens Go to College and College Confidential (both 1960). All are terrible, though some have value as high camp, and as time capsules of the era in which they were made. College Confidential lacks even these meager assets.
Sociology professor Steve McInter (Steve Allen) is conducting a survey on the lifestyles and attitudes of the students at Collins College, “like a Kinsey Report on the campus!” screamed the ads. The movie opens with Sally (Mamie Van Doren) necking with someone the audience can’t identify, returning home at nearly 3:00am. Sally’s mother (Pamela Mason, wife of James) and especially her father, Ted Blake (Elisha Cook, Jr.), are horrified when Sally claims she was up all night with Professor McInter working on his “sex survey,” and the following day Blake shows up at McInter’s office, demanding answers.
On an anonymous tip, reporter Betty Duquesne (Jayne Meadows, Mrs. Steve Allen) researches McInter’s controversial study, learning that he’s opened his swingin’ bachelor pad to college “kids” (most of whom are about 30) who freely come and go, he filming their antics with a 16mm camera, including such innocuous activities like tug-of-war and a pie-eating contest. (The students act more like elementary-age students than young adults.) Betty is attracted to eccentric Steve.
Later, however, at a big party at McInter’s home, someone slips alcohol into his wholesome fruit punch, soon rendering the professor dead-drunk. When he begins running film he shot earlier, a pornographic film has mysteriously been spliced in, appalling the wholesome, white-bread students. Local grocer Sam Grover (Mickey Shaughnessy), also the local magistrate, convenes a pre-trial hearing, inviting press from around the country, including Walter Winchell, Sheilah Graham, Earl Wilson, Louis Sobol, and James Bacon all playing themselves. Winchell likens it to “the celebrated Scopes Monkey Trial,” an obvious reference to the Spencer Tracy-Frederic March film of Inherit the Wind, released earlier that summer, and which Zugsmith’s film clumsily emulates.
Incredibly, Steve Allen seemed to think of the project as some kind of legitimate, politically-progressive exploration of American youth and educational liberty, perhaps confusing Zugsmith with Otto Preminger, though probably not. Defending himself, he loftily quotes from Hamlet and threatens to quote from the Bible, but mostly makes long, dreary speeches full of senseless, professorial jargon about his study.
Zugsmith was not only talentless but, also, while his movies of this era crassly cashed in with their salacious titles and promises of promiscuous sex, drug use, etc., they’re all ultimately quite conservative. In High School Confidential!, for instance, the protagonist, a tough youth played by Russ Tamblyn, turns out to be an undercover cop trying to smash a marijuana ring. Likewise, in this quasi-sequel to that film (released by rival MGM), McInter’s survey puts frank but completely innocuous questions to the childlike students, who make the kids from AIP’s Beach Party movies look like violent delinquents by comparison.
What little interest Zugsmith’s movies generate is mostly derived from their bizarre casts: besides Van Doren and other Zugsmith regulars like Mickey Shaughnessy, Pamela Mason, and “Woo Woo” Grabowski, he frequently casts relatives, usually the sons, of major stars: Mijanou Bardot (sister of Brigit), Charles Chaplin, Jr., Harold Lloyd, Jr., William Wellman, Jr., Robert Montgomery, Jr., etc. Sometimes he’d catch rising talent on the way up (Michael Landon, Tuesday Weld) or down (Herbert Marshall, John Carradine), use downtrodden sports personalities (Rocky Marciano turns up here as a cop), and like the AIP Beach Party movies, he’d shoehorn in musical numbers that, in this case, feature Conway Twitty (who talks like Elvis) and Randy Sparks, later one of the main contributors to The New Christy Minstrels. For College Confidential, Zugsmith cannily tosses a bone to all those columnists, giving each of them a couple of lines and a close-up assuming, perhaps rightly, they’d go easy on the film and mention their appearance in their columns.
The screenplay is crude with only the skeleton of a plot: McInter’s study creates a stir on the Universal backlot, Betty falls in love with the eccentric professor but questions her judgment when the pornographic film unspools from his projector, there’s a trial and the real culprit—hardly a surprise—is caught. The End.
Steve Allen almost made it big in the movies: he played the title role in Universal-International’s The Benny Goodman Story, intended as a follow-up to their wildly popular The Glenn Miller Story, but the film received lukewarm reviews and did just okay at the box-office. By the summer of 1960, Allen’s tenure as host of The Tonight Show had ended, and his own, innovative follow-up, The Steve Allen Show had been canceled. Though he began a new talk show the following season, Zugsmith seems to have partnered with Allen at his most vulnerable.
Kino’s Blu-ray of College Confidential sources an excellent video transfer of this black-and-white, 1.85:1 widescreen production. While not listed as a new transfer, the image is impressively sharp with deep blacks, etc. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also good, supported by optional English subtitles. The disc is Region “A” encoded.
Supplements are limited to a trailer—with Allen and Van Doren appearing in original footage shot for it—and a “viewing party”-type audio commentary with David Del Valle and Stan Shaffer, not really my cup of tea for these things.
While some of Zugsmith’s other bad films from this period have a seedy, campy charm, College Confidential is lifeless and uninteresting, even compared to those films.
- Stuart Galbraith IV