A top 25 of the big films on campus

September 18, 2011|By Gerald Peary, Globe Correspondent

(Universal Pictures )

It happens each fall, the chaos and circumstance of a new college year, and nowhere is this rite of passage more vivid than in and around Boston.

What inspired raw material for the cinema: the fabric of collegiate life, the formative dance of education! So, why with the rarest exceptions, have America’s best filmmakers skipped past the university to non-academic subject matter? They’ve left campus-set features to derivative genre directors, who can’t get past lecherous professors, bosomy coeds, and frat-house keg parties.

How many college movies adhere to this vapid, formulaic plot? A nerdy undergraduate pines for the dashing blonde, but she’s involved with a haughty frat man. The nerd becomes educated in life by a pot-smoking, womanizing slacker, who has been chilling past his graduation time. The blonde catches her boyfriend philandering, and she instantly shifts her affections to the nerd. Happy ending!

Surely, there’s more to higher education. Empathetic professors, perhaps? The existential drama of being on your own as a college student? There are rare American features, spread through 85 years, which do have something to say, humorous or serious, about the university experience. The very best are, curiously, the most ancient and the newest: Harold Lloyd’s “The Freshman’’ (1925), the Marx Brothers’ “Horse Feathers’’ (1932), and last year’s “The Social Network.’’ The most rabidly popular college picture is also the very best of all: “National Lampoon’s Animal House “(1978).

The finest 25 college movies, last to first:

25. THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007) Denzel Washington directed this important saga of African-American history, celebrating the debate team of Wiley College in 1930s segregated Texas. Too bad that the film culminates in a fictitious debate against Harvard. In real life, there was a clash between Wiley and the University of Southern California, formidable enough.

24. OLD SCHOOL (2003) Todd Phillips’s practice film for “The Hangover’’ puts in motion his key mantra: Married men want to be boys, pining for the dude camaraderie and, yes, the beers and chicks of bachelorhood. His three post-30 amigos - Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughan - set up a fraternity house on the edge of campus so they can party like undergrads. Sexist, yes, but Ferrell and Vaughan sure are funny.

23. GOOD NEWS (1947) Here it is, “College: The Musical,’’ a colorful MGM remake of an earlier 1930 song-and-dance film about innocent, pie-eyed 1920s campus life. The librarian (June Allyson) falls hard for the football hero (Peter Lawford), and the predictable on-and-off romance - there’s a vamp in the way! - is surrounded by a classic score including “The Best Things in Life Are Free.’’