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In the patio living room of a house in northern California the boys tell Jean Rouverol that it is time she stopped trying to play with them. Four months later she is trying out high heels and inquiring why it is bad form to tell a boy outright she would like to see him. Junior Durkin, having grown rapidly out of the adolescent stage of wanting "a mother for my children," is captivated by a giggling siren. The Mclntyres give an ice cream and punch party at which both brother and sister find sex arduous. As "something outstanding" to attract his siren's attention, Junior pushes over a traffic cop, goes to jail. Though this experiment is unsuccessful, a new dog and girl console him. Meanwhile his sister, faring better, develops a working compromise between being a pal and a flirt.
She Loves Me Not (adapted by Howard Lindsay from Edward Hope's Saturday Evening Post novel; Dwight Deere Wiman and Tom Weatherly, producers). In 1928 Princeton University permitted Hollywood cameramen, Director Frank Wright Tuttle (Yale 1915) and Actor Charles ("Buddy") Rogers (University of Kansas) to swarm over real Princeton bedrooms, bleachers, dining halls for a "real" college cinema. Nevertheless the resultant Varsity showed the usual Hollywood misconception of U. S. college life.
She Loves Me Not is a satire on both Princeton and Hollywood. Author Edward Hope (Coffey) (Princeton 1920) needs no research or official permission to spoof his own college. Even Adapter-Director Lindsay, who spent one year at Harvard, knew well that Princeton dormitory rooms have no Chippendale furniture, no grand pianos, that no Princeton dean has ever been knocked out by an undergraduate, trussed up and photographed by newsreel men. But so deft and good-tempered are their extravagances that no injury is done.
The plot is farcically fantastic. A Philadelphia nightclub dancer (Polly Walters) reaches Princeton, almost naked in her flight from the scene of a murder. She baby-talks four undergraduates who occupy one dormitory entry into hiding her in their rooms until the police hunt blows over. One of the boys tells his father, a cinema executive, about her. The father and his assistant (Charles D. Brown) decide to exploit the girl and her romantic situation preparatory to signing her for a cinema. In the course of so doing, the dean gets knocked out, the senior (John Beal) who hit him, loses and wins again the dean's daughter (Florence Rice), the tabloids get faked photographs of the dean embracing the dancer, the four boys are expelled, communist sympathizers parade with placards, and the expulsion becomes a national issue. To show all this Director Lindsay uses a stage like a steel beehive presenting six simultaneous scenes. At one point he abandons the theatre entirely to drop a cinema curtain on which is thrown a newsreel of the U. S. Navy and the four Princetonians variously stating their case to the public. One steps forward to say: "We want the world to know that whether on the football field or in life, Princeton men can take it." Through the hip-and-thigh farce that shook Manhattan audiences with glee glimmers human comedy, warm and amiably observed. The Princeton boys are sly and expert parodies of undergraduates. One sings a burlesque of a Triangle Club song with typical undergraduate ingenuities: