When movie studios remade older hits, the result could seem ten or twenty years out of date. The Technicolor comedy About Face (1952) is a musical remake of 1938's college comedy Brother Rat, taken from the stage hit by John Monks Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe. Although set at 'Southern Military Academy,' director Roy Del Ruth's farce uses the same elements found in any standard campus comedy of the 1930s: romantic pranks, discipline from the Dean's office, a sports hero who must pass a course so he can play in the big game. Much of the comedy content was removed to make room for nine new songs written by Peter De Rose and Charles Tobias, and sung by the studio's lead crooner Gordon McRae. The romantic rivalries of three academy seniors cue wild pranks, which in turn lead to trouble with the commandant. One couple must hide a marriage forbidden by school regulations, and the boys don't know that one of the girls is really the commandant's daughter. MacRae's partners in creative disobedience are the established star Eddie Bracken and the wisecracking comic Dick Wesson. Contract player Phyllis Kirk is the secret bride with a baby on the way. Broadway dancer and singer Virginia Gibson would soon become one of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Aileen Stanley Jr. was not the daughter of the famous 1920s singer Aileen Stanley, but her favored voice student. She adopted Stanley's name when they performed together. Today About Face is remembered as the film debut of Joel Grey, then just nineteen. After faithfully carrying messages for the seniors, Grey's harried underclassman is rewarded with his own singing and dancing number, "I'm Nobody."

by Glenn Erickson