Male Animal The (1942)

Male Animal The (1942)

This is a very funny film about the lives we choose offering one woman a peek at what things may have been like if she’d chosen differently. Olivia de Havilland married the more stable intellectual played by Henry Fonda. However during college she’d been courted by a football jock played by Jack Carson. Carson returns to campus where Fonda is now a tenured professor to cheer the current team during homecoming weekend and visits his friends de Havilland & Fonda. Of course Fonda is none too thrilled at the jock’s presence or his wife’s memories of days gone by so he acts strangely. Carson’s visit is complicated by the fact that the school’s football crazy alumni represented by a trustee Eugene Pallette plays is trying to censor the ideas of a progressive student Michael Barnes (Herbert Anderson). Of course Fonda’s character supports Michael and de Havilland’s indifference to the issue also upsets her husband. There’s also a current football star Wally Myers (Don DeFore) with a natural affinity for Carson’s character. Wally and his gal (Joan Leslie) combined with actor Anderson’s Michael offers a reflection- for Carson’s de Havilland’s and Fonda’s characters – of their lives those many years ago.

Hattie McDaniel appears in a typical role; Gig Young appears uncredited as one of the students. Elliott Nugent directed and co-wrote this clever play with James Thurber; Stephen Morehouse Avery (The Gay Deception (1935)) and Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein (Casablanca (1942)) co-wrote the screenplay.

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