This sports picture, made early in Van Heflin's career at RKO, reveals the seamy underbelly of college football circa 1937: Val Webster (Van Heflin), most valuable player for Calton College, can't meet his student expenses without scalping tickets because the college insists he keep his "amateur" status. Meanwhile, higher-ups are making millions on college bowl games and the backs of young athletes. But when his friend (John Arledge) is driven to suicide, Val starts a crusade to expose the economic hypocrisy of college football to the world. Saturday's Heroes's radical ideas about college athletes being alienated from the fruits of their labor has less in common with heroic football stories like Knute Rockne All American (1940) and more in common with contemporary movies about the dirty business of football like Any Given Sunday (1999).

By Violet LeVoit