In this amazing picture (re-issued under the title, Eleven Men and a Girl), director William A. Wellman takes ten real-life, college football heroes and proceeds to make namby-pambies out of them, especially in a fantastic sequence in which the ten reveal their true identities and dance the wriggle-wiggle around the girl (Joan Bennett)! The eleventh man is our old Hell's Angels friend, James Hall, here beginning the downward slide that was to make him a totally forgotten man by 1932. Odd man out here, of course, is Joe E. Brown who doesn't really have very much to do – beyond a very sluggishly-paced episode with a bear – until the climax in which he perpetrates some amazingly hilarious variations on the theme of climbing up to a window where he gives vent to his famous yell. The screenwriter has named the college, "Upton", and it fits Joe E.'s mouth amusingly well. Moving on to Miss Bennett, it must be mentioned that she is not particularly well served here by both the photographer and the costumes designer. It actually took ten years for these Hollywood guys to get their acts together and make Miss Bennett look really great on the screen! Director William A. Wellman, however, was already most fortunately right at home and he has incorporated some typical bits of Wellman business – the camera going through a water fountain or riding on the bonnet of a car. Also already on top of their games here are musician, Erno Rapee, who directed both the pleasant background score and the musical numbers with considerable aplomb (despite what is written in the credits, at this stage Louis Silvers was actually Rapee's assistant); and film editor, Ed McDermott, whose integration of silent stock footage is amazingly dexterous. Soon after he finished editing Night Nurse, Ed died at the early age of 35 in 1931.
Review of Maybe It's Love
