She’s Working Her Way Through College ** (1952, Virginia Mayo, Ronald Reagan, Gene Nelson) – Classic Movie Review 10,229

Warner Bros filmed a musical remake of their 1942 screwball comedy The Male Animal in 1952: She’s Working her Way Through College, with Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan.

Director H Bruce Humberstone’s 1952 Technicolor film She’s Working Her Way through College is a low-key but tolerable musical treatment of the James Thurber-Elliot Nugent stage comedy The Male Animal, with songs inserted and much of the humour left out.

Virginia Mayo stars as a burlesque dancing showgirl called Hot Garters Gertie trying to become a serious actress by joining a college drama course and causing a few hearts to flutter. Mayo’s co-star is a wooden Ronald Reagan, who struggles as John Palmer, her professor who almost loses his job and his marriage in this farce-by-numbers.

The songs, including ‘I’ll Be Loving You’ (music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Sammy Cahn), ‘Am I in Love?’ (music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin), only get a C+, while the film just scrapes a D.

Warner Bros had filmed the play before (as The Male Animal) in 1942 to much better effect with the delightfully paired Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. Mayo and Reagan are no substitute for Fonda and de Havilland.

Mayo’s singing voice is dubbed by Bonnie Lou Williams.

Also in the cast are Don DeFore, Gene Nelson, Phyllis Thaxter, Patrice Wymore, Roland Winters, Raymond Greenleaf, Norman Bartold and Hope Stansbury.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,229

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