Wesley Ruggles | The Collegians: Flashing Oars / 1927 || The Collegians: The Relay / 1927 || The Collegians: Running Wild / 1927

stripped bare by bachelors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Laemmle Jr. (story), Gardner Bradford (titles), and Pierre Couderic, Phil Dunham, Gorge H. Plympton and Rob Wagner, screenplays), Wesley Ruggles (director) The Collegians: Flashing Oars / 1927; The Collegians: The Relay / 1927; The Collegians: Running Wild / 1927 

 

As gay commentator Shane Brown notes in his book Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy director Wesley Ruggles directed in 1925 a film titled The Plastic Age, which presented the life of a college athlete Hugh Carver (Donald Keith) through his entire college career, focusing on his relationship with his girlfriend Cynthia Day (Clara Bow). The next year when Ruggles, brother of actor Charlie Ruggles, had moved on to Universal he began directing a series of 46 two-reel films collectively titled The Collegians which would continue through their four years of college life from 1926-1929.

 

     Only about a quarter of the 46 films survive today, but those that do reveal that the series, centered around the handsome freshman athlete Ed Benson (George Lewis) and his nemesis / friend sophomore Don Trent (Eddie Phillips). A great many of the tropes from Ruggles’ earlier film, including the local party spot “The Hula Hula Hut” are carried over to the new series, along with one of the minor actors of The Plastic Age, Churchill Ross, who in The Collegians becomes a central figure.

       As one might expect the series basically consists of mindless good-natured 1920s visions of college life, centering around sports with many student disruptions along the way. Flashing Oars, a 1927 episode, according to Brown, is typical of the series, centering as it does upon a rowing race between Calford College and their rivals, Velmar. But in this and in other episodes such as the 1927 episode The Relay Brown observes other peripheral perspectives. Brown writes:

 

“As with many of the other Collegians films, the young men are often seen semi-naked and covered with sweat following their sporting activities, with their bodies on display in a way that is atypical for the period.  This is the case in the very first scene of Flashing Oars, as the boys are seen practicing for the race the next day, rowing shirtless down the river in two separate boats.  Both Benson and Trent are on the team for the race, but a phone call comes through to the dormitory later that evening to tell Benson that Trent has been seen out drinking. Benson and the rest of the team leave the energetic pillow-fight which is taking place and make their way to the club where Trent is drinking in an effort to bring him back to the dorm to sober up. This they succeed in doing (despite basically having to kidnap him in order to achieve their aim). The next scene shows Benson and his team mates sobering Trent up by holding him under a cold shower.  Once again, both Benson and Trent are shirtless, with the camera angle not allowing us to see below their waist.  However, it is Benson who is in physical contact with Trent as he holds him under the water knowing that, despite the animosity and fights between them, they have to work together to win the race.”

    Simultaneously, the nerdy character of the series, Doc Webster (the Churchill Ross character brought over from Ruggles’ previous film) is shown standing at the side of the shower stalls with Trent’s trousers in hand, intimating that he has been stripped of his clothes by the others. Doc, in fact, is a half-way figure between a nerd and a sissy, his sexuality indeterminate while his vocabulary is highly elevated from his peers as he explains—somewhat like the Jim Parsons’ character Sheldon Cooper speaks in 2007-19 TV series The Big Bang Theory—how the body functions and other esoteric subjects. He never dates a girl, at least in the films we have left, and he has no active interest in the sports upon which all his colleagues are focused. Accordingly, suggests Brown, he is not the “traditional sissy” yet is apparently not bullied by the others; his seeming sexuality, however, puts him in the most uncomfortable position of constantly being surrounded by “sweaty, half-naked (and almost uniformly handsome) sportsmen…[as he finds himself] not only at training sessions and events, but also in the changing rooms while the men around him shower and get changed.”

     The Relay begins with the fact that the Freshman-Sophomore rivalry in sports is tied since Benson has just beaten Trent in tennis. It is now up the girls relay race, the contest centering on June Maxwell, “the blonde hope of the Freshman class,” and Betty Jane, “who broke hearts and records for the Sophomores.” June wins, the sophomore men, as they agreed previously, having to obey the winners for 24 hours. It begins with a demand that the sophomores clean up the stands.

     But soon after, at the celebratory spot The Log Cabin, we observe the next “demand” as the Sophomore men show up in various costumes, some as ballerinas, others dressed a babies, and Trent stuck in the midst of a papier-mâché horse. They perform before the freshman who taunt them with hand gestures and fruit hurled in their direction.

     The sophomores, however, soon after, enter into the dancing causing a further ruckus as the freshman gather to toss them out of the Cabin. But Benson and friends have prepared for just that eventuality, hiring a group of older goons to pretend they are police who “discover” bottles of booze in the freshmen’s possession, even on Doc, who as one coed insists, “never drinks anything but ink.” The men trot the freshmen males (with the exception of Doc who hides under a table) out to a paddy wagon and drive off, letting them go when they reach a spot far “outside the limits.”

      Yet the Freshmen find a way, by piling on to a Model-T driven by an unsuspecting driver, to return to the party, this time prepared for a full rip-roaring and ripped-clothing battle, of which as Brown writes:

 

“The boys literally tear each other’s clothes off during the course of the fight as they wrestle within the water.  This is pure slapstick, with the sequence making relatively little dramatic sense within the course of the narrative.  By the end of the scene, most of the boys are shirtless, with some also with their trousers down. Those that have not been stripped of their shirts are so wet that their (mostly white) shirts have become see-through.”

      The melee of half-naked boys wrestling and dunking one another in a pool is about as homoerotic as films of the 1920s could get—except of the same-sex dancing scenes of Brown of Harvard, Sailor-Made Man, and Pandora’s Box, the hugs and body strokes of the Helena films and The Scarlet Woman, and, of course, the male-on-male kisses of Helena and Wings.

       The Collegians episodes make no suggestion that these college boys are homosexuals, but like young people everywhere they certainly take great pleasure in one another’s bodies. And in another 1927 episode, Running Wild, the film begins with what is described as “Old Clothes Day,” in which many of the students, dressed in old outfits have the right, apparently, to attack and strip the clothes off of any male dressed more formally. Unfortunately, they encounter a group of elderly alumni who have returned for “Old Home Week” and, seeing them only from behind, they attack and strip them as well. But even the old codgers seem to enjoy the semi-rape, arguing that they’ve haven’t had a better exercise for years. It might be any elderly gay man’s desire to be jumped upon and stripped by such beautiful young boys.

       The series was filmed at California Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendelton.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).