High Time

Blake Edwards' High Time is a simple minded Bing Crosby vehicle that Edwards transforms into a pop tone poem of color and music. The story of the film is oft repeated dreck: a successful middle-aged businessman enrolls in college to see what he missed by not getting his sheepskin. This is a tale that has been told many a time in the cinema, the Rodney Dangerfield starrer Back to School has virtually the same plot. Garson Kanin is credited with the story and the Waldman brothers (The Party, The Return of the Pink Panther) the screenplay. The project was first pitched as a Gary Cooper vehicle, but then tailored for Der Bingle. He plays Harvey Howard, owner of a chain of "smokehouse" restaurants. We first see him being let off at college by his disapproving twenty something children. However, Harvey instantly bonds with his dorm mates, played by Fabian, Richard Beymer, and Patrick Adiarte.

The trio along with the always welcome Tuesday Weld are twisting away to Harvey's le jazz hot records when they meet. Edwards shoots the interiors theatrically. Transition sequences are titled cartoons with student extras performing like stagehands. The colors are bright and geometric patterns are repeated as a motif. Static scenes of singing and dialogue are alternated with spasms of choreographed action that verges on dance. Bing, Fabian, and the gang warbling "It Come Upon a Midnight Clear" in front of a white Christmas tree is juxtaposed with an antic snowball fight. The morning routine of the dorm mates is fast cranked like a silent comedy. Edwards treats the thin plot as a revue, a series of skits to be enlivened and united by color, movement, and music. There is no effort to move Bing into the age of rock and roll. He and the kids are listening to Henry Mancini's version of big band jazz not Elvis and Bo Diddley. There is no attempt at realism in this mild fantasy, which ends with Crosby "flying" over his graduation, and that is why Mancini's vivid score does more than any element of this piece of pop ephemera to hold it together.

Tuesday Weld and Bing Crosby

The cartoon like approach that Edwards employs, similar to Frank Tashlin, is not only appropriate to the featherweight nature of High Time, but also to the demands of making a Technicolor picture in Cinemascope. As in a lot of 'scope pictures, characterization takes second place to spectacle: in this case, sporting events, bonfires, hay rides, separate dormitories, and phone booth stuffing (look it up, kids). Bing is the same as ever, contentedly coasting along. Beymer is more spritely than usual: an Edwards effect. Weld's part is a boy crazy cliche, she even flirts with Bing, but she is always peaches and cream to me. Fabian is hopeless, but I think he was a better actor than Rick Nelson. As a crooner, he was pretty lousy, maybe the worst pin-up singer ever except for the terminally flat Bobby Sherman. Fabian sings a few bars of "Foggy Dew", a tip of the hat to the burgeoning folk movement I guess, but the number is thankfully truncated. Fabian is especially unconvincing as a basketball point guard, but I watched his ineptitude wistfully. Soon, he and the other payola assisted teen idols, like Frankie Avalon and James Darren, who were manufactured to be the new Elvis after the King was drafted, were to be swept away by the rising tide of Beatlemania.

Nicole Maurey plays Bing's romantic interest, a divorced French professor. Maurey had a wide ranging career (from Diary of a Country Priest to The Day of the Triffids) and had teamed with Crosby for Little Boy Lost, but the sexual chemistry between the two is zilch in High Time. The relationship and the hit tune Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen concocted to celebrate it ("The Second Time Around") seems tailor made to burnish Crosby's image after he had recently remarried. Though he had been a romantic idol in the 1930s, by 1960 the torch had been passed to Fabian and his ilk and Crosby was better off playing a priest. There are other aspects of the film that have dated badly. At one point, Crosby has to attend a faux antebellum ball, in drag, to satisfy a requirement of his fraternity initiation. The ball seems a remnant of the pernicious romanticism of the noble lost cause view of the Confederacy. Crosby is game, but this farcical transvestism would seem better suited to a clown like Danny Kaye or Jerry Lewis.

Nicole Maurey, Bing, and Tuesday

However, when viewed within the context of Blake Edwards' career, the transvestism in High Time can be seen as a consistent leitmotif that was explored most fully in Victor/Victoria. Likewise the choreographed physical schtick that is the highlight of High Time led to the hijinks of the Pink Panther films, The Great Race, and The Party. The contributions of editor Robert Simpson and choreographer Miriam Nelson helps ensure that High Time is a motion picture that really moves. Fans of vintage television will enjoy seeing the contributions of Gavin Macleod and Yvonne Craig.