Just before settling into an outstanding action-and-gangster groove at Warner Bros. with the likes of The Roaring Twenties (1939) and High Sierra (1941), Raoul Walsh directed a handful of minor musical comedies at Paramount. Walsh didn't particularly care for these musicals, later recalling College Swing (1938), for instance, as a "silly, insubstantial [vehicle] that I rushed through shooting in record time just to get the damned thing off my back." And yet the picture still has charm and entertainment value because Walsh was too fine and professional a director not to inject his breezy sense of pace and energy.

The script, credited to four writers, centers on a young woman (Gracie Allen) who inherits a college, hires vaudevillians as teachers and transforms the campus into a hopping dance joint. This provides the excuse for a number of songs, three of which were written by Frank Loesser and Burton Lane, three by Loesser and Manning Sherwin, and one, the title tune, by Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael. The biggest hit of the score was "Howdja Like to Love Me?", composed by Loesser and Lane and performed by Martha Raye and Bob Hope.

Hope's role was originally conceived for Jack Oakie, but Hope parlayed his friendship with producer Lewis E. Gensler into the part instead. A few years earlier, Gensler had produced a Broadway show, Ballyhoo of 1932 that featured Hope; it flopped, losing money for both men, and Hope now asked Gensler to make it up to him by bulking up his part in College Swing. Gensler agreed, but except for the song with Raye, Hope essentially became simply one of the ensemble of present and future stars, including George Burns, John Payne, Edward Everett Horton and Betty Grable, who was still two years away from breaking into superstardom with Down Argentine Way (1940). "I spent most of the time staring at Betty Grable's legs," Hope later quipped.

By Jeremy Arnold