OVP: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Film: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Stars: Loretta Young, Van Johnson, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Betty Lynn

Director: Lloyd Bacon

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

When I first started this season, I talked about how I wanted to look at Loretta Young's career in part because I felt like I'd shortchanged her in terms of my opinion.  Young has always been name-checked (by me) as one of my least favorite Golden Age stars, mostly because I associate her with milquetoast roles.  As we've seen throughout this month, though, she also had room for great acting ability (The Stranger) could play ballsy roles (Midnight Mary), and had a complicated offscreen life that is still debated to this day (Call of the Wild).  Certainly, I will admit that my opinion of Young has changed...but not entirely.  We are now entering the tale-end of Young's film career, a time that was arguably her most successful.  She won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter in one of the biggest upsets in Academy history to that point (the smart money was on Rosalind Russell to win), and got a second nomination for Come to the Stable.  She also starred in what might be her best-remembered film, The Bishop's Wife, which became a holiday classic of the era.  But Young plays all of these parts too simply, and none of them deserved the praise for her that they got (save for The Bishop's Wife, honestly none of them are good movies).  I couldn't ignore this era even though I'm trying to rebrand Young a bit, and so from this peak period where she was making a lot of money in some of her least interesting work, I chose the romantic-comedy Mother is a Freshman, another hit starring Van Johnson.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's premise reads less like a Classic Hollywood film and more like something out of a 1980's sophomoric comedy.  Abby Abbott (Young) lives with her teenage daughter Susan (Lynn) in a posh New York apartment.  She's raising her on her own because her husband died, and she suddenly realizes that she's broke, and while she has a trust fund that will pay out, it will only pay out once a year, and so she has months to live in destitution.  A weird clause at a local university, though, allows her to use a scholarship named after her grandmother if she attends the school, and so she enrolls as a freshman at the same school as her daughter.  Things become complicated when we learn that Abby is crushing on one of her professors, Richard Michaels (Johnson), but Richard has the hots for the new freshman Abby, and he doesn't know that she's Susan's mother.  Hijinks ensue before everyone ends up where they're meant to be, particularly a hapless Rudy Vallee as a lecherous lawyer named John Heaslip who is also lusting after Abby as well.

The film is harmless, but also charmless.  Young doesn't really have the verve to make this work, and this is what I was dreading in doing a month devoted to her-that I'd get a month of surface-level films about a beautiful woman played in an uncomplicated manner (thankfully, up until now not the case).  She has no chemistry with Johnson (though he's superb in Brigadoon, not one of my favorites overall from this era), and Vallee, the first pop heartthrob of modern music, is completely unnecessary to keep the plot rolling.  This is not a good movie, and it's sad that this is the type of film that Young would long be associated with by film fans.

The movie got a nomination for Best Costume Design, which might be a surprise if you didn't know going into it.  I assume that the thrill here was seeing Young, known for period pieces and at this point nearly forty, wearing the fashions of the modern youth at the time, but save for one gorgeous hot pink gown (that she wears before her "transformation" and honestly it's barely photographed head-to-toe) there's nothing memorable in this picture, and it feels like a weird nomination, even if it's always nice to see the Academy honoring contemporary design, even if that "contemporary" design is 35 years older than me.