Start Cheering

Start Cheering is mostly a vaudeville revue.  Jimmy Durante is the main comic, with the Three Stooges and some other acts popping in and out periodically.  They devote substantial time to a guy who humorously eats cigarettes and paper packaging.

Here's the plot:  Ted Crosley is a movie star who has had great success playing college football heroes.  At the peak of his career, he decides to chuck it all and actually attend college.  Crosley's manager (Walter Connolly) along with his bumbling assistant (Jimmy Durante) plot to sabotage Crosley's college career so that he will return to the movies.  The sabotage attempt is doomed, however, because the Dean of the college has misspent funds on a football stadium and has only barely convinced the board of directors not to fire him, hanging his entire career on "football star" Crosley coming to school.  So despite numerous frame-ups and circumstantial evidence of wrong-doing on Crosley's part, the Dean always laughs and looks the other way.


Interesting note: Charles Starrett, who plays Ted Crosley, was on the Dartmouth football team and it was this that got him his first acting job playing an extra in The Quarterback (1926).

Familiar face: Broderick Crawford as the BMOC.

Jimmy Durante and Walter Connolly

The Three Stooges

Dancing the Susie Q as part of the Big Apple