A real life riot that broke out during a pre-Thanksgiving 1928 football game between Fordham and New York University was the inspiration for this RKO Radio Pictures sports drama, scripted by Broadway playwright (Bury the Dead) and future bestselling novelist (Rich Man, Poor Man) Irwin Shaw in his Hollywood debut. (A former varsity quarterback for the Brooklyn College Warriors, Shaw's short story "Education of the Heart" was the basis for Jacques Tourneur's 1949 gridiron drama Easy Living, starring Victor Mature.) The fictitious Atlantic University is the setting for this drama of corruption in college sports, in which the team's impoverished players (Philip Huston, Bruce Cabot, Andy Devine) rely on handouts from gambler James Gleason in order to stay in school. When Huston suffers a knee injury and Cabot leaks the news to the local odds makers, sports columnist June Travis cries foul - leading to an official investigation and interference on game day from a clutch of gangsters determined that Atlantic lose to rival Erie State. RKO shot the climax of The Big Game (1936) at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and sweetened the pot by featuring members of the 1936 All-American Football Team - Stanford's Robert "Bones" Hamilton, NYU's Irwin "King Kong" Klein, Notre Dame's Bill Shakespeare, and Ohio State's Gomer Jones - in cameos.

By Richard Harland Smith