“Joe - and Jane - College”
Greetings: This community was recommended to me, for a question that may be entertaining to answer.
I am writing a story that is (initially) set in an American university, circa AD 1942 - wartime, but not scraping the bottom as they were by 1945. So we're talking crew cuts and blazers, sweaters, skirts and saddle shoes.
Now, I know quite a bit about that era, and I have several contemporary yearbooks. But I'm deficient. I need visual inspiration. Can anyone suggest a movie which depicts scenes and life in an American university in the 1940s? Or, really, 1930 to 1955, painting it broad.
The only one I can think of, apart from the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers, is The Mummy's Ghost, which was every bit the hackwork that title suggests; it was hilariously bad. (I have reason to suspect the film, made in 1944, was partially aimed at GIs overseas: In order to bring the audience up to speed, the entire backstory is related in a “college lecture” - and you have never seen such a collection of “young, tight sweaters” as the (mostly) coeds in that audience!)
If anyone has a suggestion, I'd be delighted to hear it.
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