This film was a little hard to sit through because it was so uncomfortable to watch buster try every possible sport and to fail each time. it also was kind of weird to see him pretend to be some woody allen type of bookworm though you could tell by his body that he was all trained and in very good shape.
I really prefer the films spite marriage and camera man from this period of his work, though college is not a bad film. I just did not enjoy it as much as i thought i would.
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While it was amusing, I would also not list it among Keaton's better films.
It was interesting the way that his character was supposed to be so naive and uncoordinated when it came to sports when Keaton himself was in great shape and so acrobatic, as demonstrated in the way he performed the stunts at the end of the film and in all of his other movies.
Though Keaton did not perform the pole-vaulting jump at the end (Olympic pole vaulter Lee Barnes doubled) because he didn't want to take months to learn the one jump, apparently he always regretted not having learned it. I'm sure he would have perfected it as quickly as possible.
"I know you're in there, Fagerstrom!"-Conan O'Brien
Although Keaton didn't do the pole-vault through the window. The extraordinary tumble he does from the window (supposedly after he's "vaulted through")as an entrance, more than makes up for that one time he used a double.
The King Rules, but The Jester tells the Truth.
Oh, I loved it! He cut a very nice athletic figure (hubba, hubba!) and put it on great display in the finale!
There's a clip on YouTube where Lillian Gish was introducing "College" for a tv show, and she at one point she chuckled, "Poor Buster! Having to do all those athletic feats wrong when he was such a great athlete himself"!
As I'm sure Miss Gish and many more of us would agree, that was yet another example of what a good film ACTOR AND comedian he was.
Both Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were multi-talented geniuses in many ways, some different and others the same. But while Charlie had the natural gift of music and artwork, Buster definitely had the gift of gracefulness and athleticism - a gift also hard-earned in his early years of literal knock-about stage comedy!
I think no one(s) else before or since then* has ever had the depth and breadth of such excellent talents as these two did. Each came with his own unique background of entertainment between 1890 and 1917; schools of hard knocks that will probably remain closed forever.
(*No, not even Jerry Lewis, sorry. ;-) lol )
"Now, bring me that horizon." --Captain Jack Sparrow