That's My Boy

This is really not a review, just a note that, amazingly, the third or fourth major role in this movie, and arguably the one that gets the best performance, is that of the heroine's father, but the actor is not listed in these credits. He is, of course, Robert Warwick, who had a long career and was still appearing on TV dramas in the early 1960s, when past 80. This is actually one of his best performances on film. It might also be noted that although it seemed a very long time before he was recognized as the excellent actor he was (mainly through John Ford) and was often playing little more than walk-ons all through the 1930s, Ward Bond, here seen at 29, is excellent in a single-but-telling scene as semi-washed up ex-football player who puts the Richard Cromwell character on to the way his college and football team are using him to feather their own nests while he gets nothing out of it. (Cromwell was limited, perhaps because of his ever-boyish looks, but gives a very credible performance here.) But one does wonder why it took until the late 1940s before Bond received recognition for the fine character actor he was and always had been.

The other review appearing here is very misleading, as John Wayne does not play a sportsman, but an athlete, in this film, has no lines that I could hear, and is simply in a few football scenes, none of them calling any kind of attention to him. If he wasn't identified in the credits, you wouldn't even know he'd been in it, ditto Buster Crabbe.