The Freshman (1925) with Sean Crosson

Welcome to the debut episode of Field of Scenes.

I'm Adam Kempinar.

Travis Fogan.

We are colleagues in the Sport, Media, and Culture program at the University of Iowa. Can we say friends too, Travis?

Yeah, we're getting there.

We're getting there.

It's been a little while now that we've known each other. I think we're friends. Yeah, yeah, I think we're friends. I think we are as well.

We're certainly getting to know each other better as we've been doing this podcast.

Yeah.

We've had lunch twice.

We've had lunch a few times. We love sports movies. We definitely have that in common.

For sure.

We also have in common that we teach the sport and film class here at Iowa. You've taught it many times. I am going to be teaching it for the second time here coming up. And with that in common, we had an idea and that was let's start a sport and film podcast. We know there are a lot of other people out there in the world who love sports movies.

So maybe we can dig into these a little bit more. And the best part of doing a podcast is not only sharing information and insights about these movies with the world, but we get to learn something too.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's kind of a fun team up partnership because, you know, Adam, you've been doing these podcasts for years and years and And I'm a professor and I write about sports and media. And so we started having these conversations about sports films when you started teaching the course for us. And the conversations I found really fun and interesting because we were kind of coming at it from slightly different angles. And I wound up learning things about the films when you were talking about them that I hadn't really considered myself.

And so the conversations just sort of kept happening in the hallways here in the Adler journalism building. And then they, you know, manifested into this new project.

Yeah.

And I was of course, using you as a sounding board because you've written many books on this subject. And as I mentioned, you've taught this class several times. So I was always getting something out of those discussions as well. And we thought maybe this podcast would be an opportunity to create opportunities to talk about some of our favorite movies.

And in some cases, explore some movies. This is more for me because you have been researching these films and teaching about them for a long time. Maybe we'll get to a blind spot or two for you, but really for me, explore some movies we haven't seen before.

And also talk to some really brilliant people.

There are a lot of, after we started digging in, there are a lot of sports movies and a lot of movies that might not necessarily be sports movies, but kind of touch on it indirectly. And I've been shocked by how many I haven't seen, given the fact that I grew up in this world, interested in movies, and then wound up writing about this very specific genre. There are still dozens and dozens that I haven't seen and dozens I've never even heard of. So it's a big area when you start to dig in.

Yeah, it absolutely is, which is good for us because it means that we've got a lot of fodder for future podcasts. And we hope to keep this going for a while. Real quick, before we get into this episode and set it up and set up our guest, you wrote a book called The Boxing Film. Would you say that boxing movies are your favorite type of sports film?

You know, I don't know if I have a favorite type of sports film, but boxing movies, there's sort of a disproportionate amount of films made about boxing. And it's kind of a genre unto itself or a sub-genre unto itself within the sports film genre. And one of the things that I find really interesting about boxing, one of the things that sort of I talk about in the book a lot is that boxing films have maintained kind of a consistent presence in cinema culture, even as the sport of boxing has kind of had these ups and downs.

And so there's something about the sport of boxing that seems to be always attracting filmmakers, its connection to kind of the seedy underworld, how it boils down conflict into this really kind of simplistic form, how it deals with race and gender. And so I think I mostly thought boxing films were interesting or maybe more interesting than other kinds of sports films. But then once I started digging into it, I found some films in that genre that I think are truly amazing and that I love, like The Setup, Fat City, and several others. And so I did come to really kind of love the boxing film in its own way, but I mostly chose to write about it just because I thought it was, I don't know, maybe there was just more to say about it than

some of the other types of sports film genres.

The boxing film might just be a subgenre. We get an entire season out of at some point. And that is how we're thinking of this podcast conceptually as one that we might do in season form. And this first season, we're approaching in terms of origin stories, I suppose, with our guests. We're bringing on different people, not necessarily all academics, but the first few guests out of the gate are We've got some great people that are colleagues of yours, people you've known for a long time, really, really smart people who have written about these films, talked about these films at length. And these are movies that really shaped how they think about sports movies, in some cases, how they think about the world, stoked their passions for the field.

In some ways, it's why they are doing what they do. So maybe you can talk about that just a little bit, but also set up for our listeners some of the titles that they'll hear about for sure over the course of this season.

Yeah, we kind of sort of invited a collection of folks who study this material. Almost all of them at the beginning are academics or scholars who have written about this in scholarly venues. And one of the things we saw, as Adam mentioned, is that these folks were inspired to write about this as part of their intellectual work. But in a lot of cases, these were films that were really kind of formative for them as they were growing up, as they were developing their interests, as they were kind of figuring out their intellectual and personal paths. And so we're going to be looking at films like Hoop Dreams, Hurricane, Wildcats, The Freshmen, Hoosiers, and some others. And, you know, kind of weaving in our discussion of the film itself with

their sort of personal narratives of how they found the film and how it impacted them kind of personally, but also intellectually and professionally.

You mentioned the film that we're going to talk about first, The Freshman, and it really is perfect because it starts us off chronologically, takes us back to Harold Lloyd and 1925.

It's right in time for college football season.

And also our guest wrote one of the definitive sport and film texts that is called sport and film.

Yeah.

And honestly, like it was one of those examples of somebody suggesting a film. I think I'd seen it years ago, but kind of half watched it and dug back in. And I was sort of blown away by how much there was to talk about it. And so our guest was Sean Cross, and he's a senior lecturer in the School of English Media and Creative Arts at the Houston Film School at the University of Galway in Ireland. And he also leads their sport and exercise research group there.

And he studies the relationship across film, visual media, and sport. And the real reason we invited him is because he wrote this book called Sport and Film, which was published in 2013 by Rutledge. And actually, this last year, 2026, a new edition just came out. And he also edited the book Sport, Film, and National Culture, which Rutledge published as well. And so we thought he was kind of a perfect person to invite. And, you know, lo and behold, he suggested kind of a foundational sports film, which is a really good one to start off.

It was an invaluable text for me during the first semester that I taught the class.

And I love that we had a chance to talk with Sean.

And this was one of those films that I was sure kind of like you, Travis, you said, maybe you half watch. I was sure I had seen this before. I know I had watched scenes from it. I had once taken a silent cinema class that focused a lot on, on Chaplin and Keaton. I know we watched Lloyd, but I, I can't remember if I'd actually watched this film in full and then getting to sit down and watch it now, now through the lens of, of sport and film and getting to talk then to an expert like Sean was, was very rewarding.

So, Hopefully, our listeners enjoy the conversation as well.

Dr. Sean Crossan, it's so great to have you here on Field of Scenes to talk about The Freshman, a silent comedy starring Harold Lloyd as Harold Speedy Lamb, who is determined to become the big man on campus at Tate University. even if it means having to prove himself on the gridiron. Do you remember the first time you saw the freshman and what your response to it was?

That's an interesting question. I've been thinking about that. I have kind of vague memories. When I was very young, but we're going back now to the 70s, 80s, 80s, I think it was maybe BBC Two, one of the British channels, I think they used to run kind of silent cinema in the weekend afternoon. I think it was probably Saturday afternoon. They used to have Chaplin and Keating and Laurel and Hardy. And I have a very vague record, and I was very young at the time, of seeing scenes from The Freshman back then and just a sense of kind of awe in Harold Lloyd in his, I mean, extraordinary physical comedy, which he brought to all of his roles.

And then, of course, when I set upon the path of exploring film and particularly sport film, it brought me back and brought me much deeper into the film And that would have been about probably in the mid-naughties, I guess. Yeah, probably 05, 06, 20 years ago or so when I started to initial kind of work around Sport and Film, the book. And it was in that context that I really took a much deeper dive into the film and into its richness and its huge impact and influence on...

on cinema, on comedy cinema, and of course on sports cinema. Still to this day, I think the legacy of it still is there in contemporary sports film practice.

So that may set up perfectly this next question. I know this is why we have you on the show is to dig into this, but before we really dig into it, we offered you the chance to pick any sport film that was meaningful to you. Was that why you picked this one because of its legacy ultimately?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think that's it. I mean, it was, there are so many sports films, you know, it's such a, that's one of the challenges for all of us who engage with the area is, and of course that's related to the question of what is a sports film as well, because sport is so ubiquitous. There's hardly a genre that doesn't have sport there and some often quite prominently. Yeah, when I was mapping the story of film and sports film in particular and mapping its progression from really I mean, extraordinary experiments in the first experiments in capturing motion photographically, way back in the work of Edward Muybridge and others, and then through Edison. And when you map that story and you're identifying when the kind of different forms and

generic paradigms came into, began to coalesce, The Freshman is really a critical text. It's a critical moment. It's a moment just before the emergence of sound cinema. It's also a moment in which you see fiction narrative cinema really coming into its own in that decade. So it was also in its time, it was Lloyd's most commercially successful film.

It was the third biggest film at the box office in 1925. And it was, I think, in the comedy genre, perhaps one of the biggest, if not in the top two or three over the entire decade. So it's a phenomenally impactful text in its own time. But it set a template in many ways for sports cinema as it developed across the subsequent decades, right up to the contemporary experience of sports cinema today.

Can you talk a little bit about that template?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I go in, in my book, I, particularly in the American context, and of course, sports cinema was a huge, in terms of its development, Hollywood, American cinema has been hugely influential in terms of the form and the impact and its influence internationally. And so that template is very informed by the American dream ideology. Uh, and the ideas that underpin that, and that's at the heart of the freshman. This is a young, young Harold Lam who is fully has fully embraced the American dream and all of the particulars of that from the very first scenes of the film. When you see his parents downstairs is discussing, uh, you know, his, his going to college and how he got, and he's, you know, his,

his entrepreneurial spirit where he's been going around selling washing machines. gathering the pennies and the money together so he can put himself through college. So that idea of the self-made man, the guy who has managed to overcome perhaps challenging circumstances to put himself through college and to achieve success, that success, the sport becoming a metaphor within the film then for that larger success through his, despite, I mean, as Harold Lloyd was not, in terms of his, physical appearance, he was the emphasis of the kind of American football player, even then, you know, of the physically impressive figure. Um, but he nonetheless can become the key, uh, player within the college football team and can overcome all of the

physical and other, uh, challenges he's presented with to, uh, to cross the line, you know, to achieve the victorious touchdown. And to become claimed as the hero, the college hero, ultimately in the film. So that's one of the kind of big legacies, that kind of narrative, that trajectory, which is one that has been one of the most familiar and recurring across the genre throughout the 20th century. And not just in the US, it's, you know, the underdog story, right?

This is what so many people gravitate to or are inspired by and that the freshmen encapsulated very powerfully and effectively.

Just to build off that a little bit, I saw a quote from Ron Shelton, who, you know, director of Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, two of my favorite sports films. I'll leave out Play It to the Bone, but I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it in a long time. So maybe I'm being too harsh on it. Ron Shelton, maybe if we're doing a sport film, O'Toole or Mount Rushmore, he has to be on there. And in an interview, he was talking about his love And he says this, I think this speaks to exactly what you were talking about with Lloyd in The Freshman. He never wallows and he's more modern in a certain way.

He's more of an I'm going to do something about it kind of guy. In The Freshman, he's the one who rallies the football team. Now that he knows that he's being treated like a fool, he's going to fix it. He's not going to go off and look in the mirror and be sad and do a Chaplin-esque turn. So even you see with Keaton, even a little bit, that kind of wallowing, more so with Chaplin. But you really don't get that with Lloyd at all in this film.

He is just like plucky throughout and he's just going to go and make something happen. And if anybody seems to capture this American spirit or this idealized version of the American underdog spirit, it does seem to be Lloyd here, doesn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And very, very powerfully, very effectively. Everything you've said there, I think, is very, very true. And also, you used the term modern there in terms of the film. I think it's a really fascinating text of its time. And viewers watching it today, I think, will find that also really. And things like, you might recall at the beginning, there's a reference to his father as a radio liar. Yeah.

Which was a craze in the 1920s. So, This connects with a broader discourse, if we want to get into it. I mean, why did this film happen when it happened, right? So the 1920s was, as I'm sure you're both aware, was the golden age of American sport. This was a key moment in the popularization of American college sport and sport more broadly. And it was one of the key forces in that popularization was radio. that radio was critical.

It was how it spread and had the impact. I mean, of course, the print journalism was also important, but nothing was more important. Radio was king because this is, of course, pre-television and cinema was still consolidating itself as a popular medium. But radio, that reference to radio is very important. It's not just a kind of by-the-way reference. It's a reference that a lot of people in that moment would have responded to would have connected with their experience of sport and then creating a joke out of this idea of the hobbyist um dx hobbyists as they were called the guys who were trying to pick up china and all parts of the world on their radios often fabricated or exaggerated as as in the case of harold's father in

the film at the beginning of the film um but this was a it was a critical moment even in um if you think of the final kind of football sequences in the film, the film itself, that context, California, in the early 1920s, there was four major stadia built for football in that period, three of which are featured in that final sequence. These are massive, just like the LA Coliseum, the California Memorial, these are massive, massive stadiums.

The L.A.

Coliseum held the Olympics twice subsequently. So these are huge auditory theatres of sport that responded to this incredible interest, excitement that sport was engendering in the people. which also responded to another theme that's very, very prominent in the film, which is its exploration of masculinity, but in a really imaginative way. You can see it in terms of what the film is about, kind of excavating around the way in which sport becomes such a critical space in which masculinity was being performed and demonstrated in American culture. I mean, it's an incredibly gendered film in many ways, if you watch it today, particularly in a context where, thankfully, women's sports are much more prominent. But this was a period

where women were largely excluded from sport. And where it was about defining what men are. And that's like literally, you know, encapsulated in the intertitles in the film. The description of the coach as, what was it, so hard he shaves with a blowtorch. And the regular kind of reference to proving their fighting spirit, their manhood, which... Lloyd is really cleverly kind of undermining and poking fun at, you know, in a quite sophisticated way within the film, particularly in that training sequence earlier on in the film.

Do you find it interesting at all, it just occurs to me as we're talking about this underdog tale, that when we think about movies like Rocky, made in, coming out in 76, and America needs this boost. That's the lore around it, right? That's why it connects with people. And even a movie like Miracle coming out post 9-11 and looking back on America's glory in a time when America needed to be inspired. And I'm certainly not an expert on this period, but 1925 isn't exactly the Great Depression, right?

This is a time when certain segments of the, of the populace may be struggling, but overall America is, is flying high. And yet an underdog tale like this, it seems to be a case where this is, this is a story as Americans, we just love to have reinforced again and again and again.

I think so. I think so. I mean, America, not that, like 1925 is only, what, seven years after the First World War. So, I mean, there had been a traumatic precursor to before that period of economic expansion and cultural expansion into the 1920s, which was also something that was inspired by by that kind of traumatic experience of the war.

That this was about America coming back to itself and reasserting itself on the globe. And of course, one of the legacies of the First World War was that America grew to become the superpower it now is. And it also, I talk a little bit about this in the book, towards the end of the 1910s, after the war, there was some research done that part of the reason why you see sport become so important was that it was responding to anxieties about the American male, about American men, that they needed, you know, culturally and in terms of education, that physicality needed to be prioritised, male health and wellbeing need to be prioritised so that they could cultivate, should another war, and sadly another war did arrive, that America

would be prepared. And sport was a critical part of that kind of cultural and societal response to the trauma of World War One. And, you know, within that, like repeatedly within the freshman, that term, are you ready to fight? Why can't you stand up? Like even even Harold in his final, when he gets finally gets onto the pitch in the final sequence. he turns around to the players, why are you hanging about there like old women? Can you not get up and fight like men? You know, that idea of instilling a fighting spirit is one that's a kind of a recurring message across the film as a whole. And that's not disconnected. It is a response still in that moment to the kind of legacy of World War I, and the attempt to rebuild, to reinstill

the appropriate values, masculine, manly values within the American male that sport was critical to.

It's funny how they're commenting on that too with him coming into the practice with the cup on his face, you know, which is very much a kind of commentary on the relationship between virility and football, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And him just not getting it.

And yet, where it ends up, right?

As much as it is sending up traditional masculinity, what is more masculine and still to this day, we're, we're wrestling with this, then this traditional notion of toughness, especially around football, then a guy getting stretchered off the field, but what does he do? He comes right back onto the field, right? It's not really pain. He can play through the pain. Even Harold can play through the pain and comes back on the field. And we cut to the shot of his girl cheering for him and the crowd cheering for him. And he still makes the, he makes the big play. And, and so that's what's the, the contradictions of this film are ultimately what really make it worth critically analyzing because it, it, it satirizes it.

But then in the end, it's, it's, it's why Hollywood.

Has become this mass entertainment force. That's this, uh, ability, this, polysemic ability to be able to provide multiple points of identification for audiences both those who would have been critical of the kind of hyper masculinity and those who would have identified with it both of those audiences can find something that connects with their kind of way of viewing the world within the film and I'm sure Lloyd was conscious of that but it's not just it's a trope you find across you know right across hollywood mass entertainment forms and the freshman but i said what the freshman is part of its significance is it's it's one of the an early kind of full feature length narrative popular example of of how he's navigating these kind of as

you say what might appear to be contradictory impulses but he manages nonetheless to I hesitate to say resolved, but he manages to find a way to negotiate between them within the film that audiences can, more generally, can respond to. And, you know, it's hard not to be... Like, he's a likable character, you know? It's partly that. He's somebody that you identify with, you root for, you laugh with, you sympathise with. All of the emotions are invoked across the film.

And then ultimately you're, you're kind of uplifted by, and, and is that, you know, his relationship with Peggy and the way in which she comes back in those kind of heartwarming moments between those two. And there's a great chemistry between, uh, Rabina Ralston and, and Lloyd as well, of course, because they'd been, this was, I think their seventh or eighth feature to film. She had been a recurring love interest for him across so many films. So you can see that kind of connection coming through. in the film as well. And that's the other thing to say about the film more generally is that this wasn't a one-off in the sense that this Lloyd was working with, uh, as all the great kind of creators did, they had

a kind of a team of people that they returned to, whether it was the directors, um, uh, new Meyer and, and, um, Sam Taylor. Fred Neumeyer and Sam Taylor, who he worked with. I think Sam Taylor he worked with was eight films. Neumeyer with three films, including The Freshman. He worked with Walter London, the DOP, who he worked with across, I think, 13 films in his career. So he was working with a kind of an established group of people. And many of the actors like Rabina Ralston were also people who he returned to, who built up with this connection and understanding with, which contributed to the kind of, I suppose, the overall coherence and strength of the work that we encounter in the freshmen.

You know, I was going to ask you something because in the United States, for better or worse, probably for worse, sports and schooling are so intimately intertwined, right? And as you know from watching these films, a lot of social status is woven into participating in sport. We see that with, um, you know, the, the most popular guy on campus, uh, uh, Chet Trask, right. Um, but you're not from the States and it's very different. The way sports work are very different, um, uh, where you are. And can, can you talk about, you know, sort of how, how that point of view sort of informs your, your reading of something like the freshmen? Because for, For folks like Adam, I mean, it's just like, I can't really even imagine a world. in which sports were

not one of the biggest, if not the biggest parts of the social structure of a school institution.

Maybe this was one of the things that kind of drew me to it. So in Ireland, like the US, football is not soccer. the main football is Gaelic football. It's our national, the most popular sport in Ireland, right? And in a way, like the first time I encountered, in the US, it's always American football. So there was, I think there's this point of identification. A lot of Irish people watch and follow American football. It's hugely popular.

And of course, a lot of Irish Americans have excelled. I'm thinking of Tom Brady and there are many others in American football. And it actually is a sport that's closer to Gaelic football and how it's played. So there was a point of identification, I think, for me, like with American football and the way in which sport works.

And for, I think, for Irish people more broadly, the global conception of football is something that's quite different to how we conceptualise it, whether that's in the US with American football or in Ireland with Gaelic football. So there's a distinctive kind of cultural point there that's coming from where I come from that I felt, provided the point of identification with the American experience. Sport in Ireland is also something that's integrated with the education system, but it functions, I think, quite differently in that sport. Well, to be honest, I'm not that familiar with the American kind of education system in that respect. But in Ireland, it's very local, locally based sport. And Gaelic games is non-professional, it's an

amateur sport, but it's still the most popular sport in the island, whether that's Gaelic football or hurling. And it's very connected with where you're from. But I guess college football has that as well, that it's a hugely important point of social identity in the Irish context. So, for example, the elite level of Gaelic games is at the count, what we call the county level. And you'll see a lot of people, I see them when you're in the States, when I visit the States, I see a lot of Irish-Americans also will gravitate to the county in Ireland that their ancestors came from by wearing a Gaelic games county jersey, right? Colours.

But in Ireland, it's a hugely important part of people's own sense of themselves, of who they are. And it's built on a communal connection that sport has been critical to fostering. I guess the growth of the college game in the US in a way has some parallels in terms of how people identify with the colleges because they're the local college or because they went to that college.

And it provides a kind of a distinctive sense of their own identity, whether it's the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame or whether it's another group from another part of the States. In a way that... maybe American football with the exception of maybe the Green Bay Packers. I'm thinking of most of it's now a huge corporate franchise that doesn't have that same kind of connection with a local community that perhaps colleges still maintain to a greater extent.

And Travis, kind of connecting to that, thinking about silent films, and I'd really have to research this a little bit more. I don't know how often I think about some of my favorite gags or my favorite jokes being tied to the intertitles. But there are some really funny bits in the title cards here, including the one about the dean.

The line about the dean never marrying because he didn't want his wife to ever call him by his first name. But the one before that, the first one I wrote down that made me laugh. But another way this movie feels incredibly modern is... is the line about Tate being a large football stadium with a college attached to it.

This is something that would feel modern and prescient if we were talking about this in the 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever. But especially now in the age of NIL, where it feels like we're essentially our college athletes, our pro athletes, right? And the academic side or the attachment side to college and feeling any real loyalty to your college team sort of feels completely secondary. It just struck me that I couldn't believe a movie in 1925 was tapping into something that felt so correct today.

But that's the moment. So you're witnessing the moment in which the freshman really powerfully kind of captures. This was precisely the moment when that coalesced, when that connection really fully came alive. came into being and when the legacy of which we're still living with today in terms of the contemporary experience of college football in the US. So that's part of the reason why the film is such an important and key text in terms of college film, sports film, and as a historical document of that moment in which the two, the kind of popularization of both cinema, sport, football are all kind of coming together within this one film text.

Crazy to think about now, but, you know, at the time, college football was many times more popular than the NFL. At this point, the NFL had only been around for a couple of years. And so college football was, you know, right up there with baseball and boxing at the time as our major, major sports.

I don't know that we would look to Peggy as one of our all-time great female characters in sports films. But in sport and film, you talk about gender and you describe the typical portrayal of women in these movies as beautiful, inspirational, sexualized, or untrustworthy, exploitative, the femme fatale.

I really like the way in Noah Gattel's book about baseball, the movie, his recent book, he quotes Susan Slusser, who's a major league baseball reporter, the way she characterized how she saw women portrayed in sports movies growing up, support the player or seduce the player.

That's how it is.

She fits into one better than the other two, but she doesn't really fit neatly into your categories because she's certainly not the femme fatale. She's certainly not like Myra Fleener in Hoosiers, the transformed critic. She's closest to the inspirational muse, but where the freshman is a little bit odd is that Harold has, she has her love pretty much throughout the movie. She already kind of adores him, right?

And this is where it's different than Buster Keaton in college, too, is that there's really, there's no real attempt on his part to win her love through sport. It really is just about proving his masculinity and proving how.

He can be a success, isn't it? I would say, though, I mean, she is a kind of critical force, an inspirational force. I'm thinking particularly the scene at the end of the horrendous frolic, you know, the ball that he's hosted and he's gone wrong in every way conceivable and he's left with his clothes hanging off him. And she kind of turns to him and says, Harold, you need to be yourself. You need to prove yourself. You know, stop trying to be, you know, people please or whatever.

Stop trying to be the most popular guy. Just be yourself. And he kind of turns around and says, yes. that's what I need. And then I need to go out onto the football field. And she's a bit kind of, okay, what didn't exactly mean that? But it's how he interprets it and he runs with it and somehow takes that inspiration, drives him forward to become the star of the football game.

But you're right, there is a kind of a, there's a knowingness to that as well and a kind of a, you can see in those scenes that she, as you said, she, from the moment she sees the tread hanging from his shirt and, you know, and she decides to start sewing on his buttons, that from that very moment on, she's kind of, you know, she's falling, falling for him and him for her. But she's also, aware of things that he can't see. Right. So he, he, he thinks he he's a real, ultimately from the very beginning. I mean, a lot of it, and this is a part of the sophistication of the film as well. All of that, you see him up in his room. And by the way, the film was initially called rah, rah, rah. I came across that was looking, that was the first title they

were working towards. And then, and thankfully he didn't go with that, but it was a term that, um, it was, it was really used in another film. So hence the freshmen, but when he's up in his room, all excited about going to college and rah, rah, rah. A lot of that is coming out of his own sense of insecurity, you know, that he's completely overblown his conception of who he might be and who he could be and how he has to be the next Chet Trask and he has to be the most powerful. All of that's coming from his own insecurity. She can see through that from the beginning. She can see that at its core, this guy has got a genuine kind of good heart, a good core. And he just needs to see that himself and believe in himself. And eventually in that final kind

of scene before the football game he gets it and even if he misses he interprets it his way of interpreting that is to go towards proving himself on the football field which fortunately he does and we could talk about whether how realistic that is or is not but how much of it is realistic ultimately anyway in terms of a film but it is about providing a way for him to find himself, find his own sense of himself and his own kind of sense of his significance as a person.

The other trope that I find really fascinating here, and I don't know if you've had a chance yet to read Chuck Klosterman's recent book called Football, but he talks about He devotes a section to the head coach. And if you'll bear with me for a second, I want to read this part because it's just so good. And I was thinking about it the entire time I was watching the head coach here. He says, with the possible exception of used car salesmen, there's no vocational stereotype quite as fixed as that of a football coach. There are endless examples of real life coaches who contradict this stereotype, but almost none in fiction where a coach's personality is always the same. Negative depictions of football coaches, Dazed and Confused,

Varsity Blues, The Slaughter Rule, present characters with the same core sensibilities as those depicted positively. Eric Taylor in Friday Night Lights, Ted Lasso in Ted Lasso. Even when a portrayal strikes for ambivalence, as with Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, the caricature stays locked.

Craig T.

Nelson played a problematic antagonist in the movie All the Right Moves and an affable protagonist in the TV sitcom Coach without changing his baseline persona at all. There are certain traits all football coaches are expected to possess. They're demanding, unapproachable and obsessed with detail. They are patriarchal, realist with juvenile interests. They're emotional, but only demonstrative when the emotion is anger or pride. He goes on and not all of what he says applies to the limited view of the coach we get here. But almost all of it does.

And it just, it's crazy to me that even in 1925, when this genre, these football movies, these college football movies are starting to be churned out, that this stereotype, this convention of the football coach is already established.

Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. It's fascinating, actually. And I I'll have to seek out that book after we speak. But, I mean, The Coach is... If you think about it, though, The Coach is... I'm always trying to think about these films in terms of how they are not just in the sense of depictions of sport and depictions of sport in a particular moment, but the kind of purposes of these characters, you know, why have these roles evolved in the way they have and why have they been depicted in the way they are? And as the word coach, these guys are coaching, but they're not actually, obviously, you know, at a surface level, they're coaching sport. But much more than that, they're coaching men on how to be men.

You know, it's about coaching masculinity. And that hasn't changed in many ways. Although, It's only changed in so far as that ideas of what it is to be a man have evolved somewhat, thank God, over the last 100 years, right? But that role hasn't changed. They may be pointing out how to function on the football field or on the basketball court or in ice hockey or whatever. I'm thinking of Keith, the coach in Miracle.

Oh, Kurt Russell.

Kurt Russell, thank you.

Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that role that they are all, it's, it's teach whether he's, you know, educating young men about what it is to be young men in the, in the Cold War era, or it's about, in this case, how to be men in the 1920s and how to kind of develop yourself into the, what's considered the appropriate kind of physical specimen of a man, of a man in that, in that context.

or how it evolves in later contexts. And you mentioned Ted Lasso, it becomes more complex in a contemporary context and how we understand what a man is today and how a man demonstrates his own kind of sense of his place in the world. And that's, I think, partly why coaches have been such a kind of enduring focus and enduring characters across the whole history of sports cinemas.

That archetype is so strong, too.

You know, you see it with sometimes talk with students about this with somebody like Joe Paterno, you know, and what happened at Penn State with that passive child sex abuse scandal. It was so hard to imagine the possibility that something unsavory or even less than, you know, honorable could happen under the watch of this trusted patriarch that nobody looked, right? And so thinking about kind of the underside of that really powerful mythology and how it enables certain behaviors and mistreatment, I think, is such an interesting way to kind of consider the the history of that myth of the coach over time and how firmly it's been in place by things like the freshmen.

No, you're absolutely right. And you know, when I was watching the film again, I mean, it's, it's played for laughs, but the way in which Harold Speedy Lamb is treated in that training session is pretty horrific. I mean, if it wasn't played for laughs, you know, you're basically taking a guy out and the coach is encouraging all the players to physically attack him in as, you know, as horrific a way possible. You know, the injuries, there's no kind of.

How do we say it? There's no subtlety to it whatsoever. And in the context, Lloyd being that extraordinary ability in terms of physical comedy can use that in a way that can play down the laughs. But if you look at it another way, and if you had a different soundtrack accompanied it, you could look at it and say, if this is actually going on, and perhaps it was in some contexts where coaches were treating players in that way or subjecting players to that type of horrific kind of physical abuse, you'd have to say, whoa.

And just humiliation, you know, and embarrassment.

You know, it's framed as a rite of passage, you know, but it's, you know, borderline abuse.

It is, yeah.

Absolutely.

And it's obviously meant to show people what Harold can withstand and, and just how much of an underdog he is that he can overcome all of that. And, you know, he's even labeled just the football coach as some of the characters are in the, in the cast, you know, the cat and the bell and some of those different, different labels that people would, would know and, and understand.

And immediately, immediately get.

I wanted, I wanted to ask you this thinking about this movie as a football movie, look at the, the AFI list is just one, but the AFI top 10 from 2008, you've got in the top five, you got two boxing movies. You have two baseball movies. You got a basketball movie, then six through nine, a billiards film, golf, cycling, and horse training, equestrian in, in national velvet, a football movie does squeak in at number 10 in Jerry Maguire.

And that's, that's, That's a movie that's more about the business of sports, clearly, about being an agent.

It's a romance. It's those more than a movie about the sport of football.

And I'd even go so far as to say that, you know, while Rod Tidwell is clearly meant to be a diva wide receiver, he could probably be a diva athlete in any sport. Now that, again, is just one list, but it isn't really until, you know, you get post-2000 movies like the blind side and remember the Titans with some of these lists that you start to see football movies, get more love. And yet football has been the dominant sport in American culture for decades now.

Yeah.

Why do you think it is that it's all of these other sports movies that got, get all the praise and, and love and it's football movies that don't connect as much.

Yeah. That's an interesting point. So, I mean, it's a, it's, it's, To produce a good, a really good football film is more challenging, just practically speaking, in terms of, I mean, one of the challenges for all sports is, you know, being able to capture it with a degree of kind of integrity and authenticity. So obviously boxing for that reason, because it's, you know, ready-made drama in a ring and you can, particularly since the advent of Steadicam and other technologies, there's ways in which you can capture that quite powerfully and effectively. Football is a much more complex sport to capture and to do so with a way that is convincing for audiences that are so immersed in the experience

of football since the advent of television. And that's another reason, which is that from the 1980s 50s onwards, really. The Freshman is one of the most popular examples, but there was a huge number of football films made between the 1930s right up until the 1950s, after which the numbers declined quite rapidly. And the reason being television took over as the popular medium for experiencing football. And other sports kind of came to prominence within film, as some of which you've mentioned already. So I think that has also been a factor in terms of why football hasn't featured as much in that period post the arrival of television.

I don't know. I mean, another factor, I guess, to say, and I don't know if it's as relevant to the AFI list, but certainly in the international context, is that American football is American football, right? So we're talking about the global impact of sports cinema. The Blind Side, you mentioned there, for example, which was hugely successful in the US, but less so internationally. It did do some numbers internationally, but generally Hollywood films, most of their box office comes abroad.

The Blind Side, that wasn't the case. Most of it, the vast majority came from the US. So in terms of making that kind of global impact, other sports have been more effective in connecting with audiences internationally because they have that identification with the sports concerned, whether that's even golf, for example. See, Adam Sandler had another... Oh, God. Happy Gilmore film come out there recently and so on. And basketball as well, as, you know, both in documentary and film.

You mentioned cycling. And the other thing to say as well, of course, which I touch upon in the new edition of Sport and Film, is that, I mean... a lot of this now is gravitated to these OTT services and, you know, all of the major streamers now have got dedicated sports channels there, both for documentary and fiction, like Netflix at home. And, you know, there's a whole genre there of sport films, both documentary and fiction now, as there is with Disney and with all the other streaming companies.

So a lot of that experience now is happening in people's, you know, living rooms around the world.

I used to, I used to work in the NHL and for a while, a conversation that the league had with teams and we never obviously solved it was that there was concern that there wasn't the connection that the fans had with the players. The way other sports had was because of wearing helmets and, and there was a barrier there. And I wonder if on some level that's just a small part of it, that the close-ups aren't as impactful with football players the way they could be with a boxer or a basketball player even. And another thing that I can't get too deep into because it's been a little while since I read it, but one of the things Klosterman talks about in that book, football, is the symbiotic nature of television and football and how

they were essentially made for each other. You think about the widescreen of the football field matching– the screen of the television, you know, and, and, and how they, they, you can't, you can't separate the, the success of the two and maybe the cinematic relationship there isn't the way it is with boxing. That said, I did want to at least mention that watching, and this is something Ron Shelton singles out too, in that interview I quoted earlier, it doesn't feel faked at all. The way you get the sense of the full arena, the stadium is, And then the way when he's running, when he's scrambling and the camera is either following him or leading him to the end zone, it's really impressive just on a technical

level that he pulled that off.

Absolutely. I wonder, I mean, I wonder if some of that, if you go back to, and I'm just looking through my notes to remind me of the, oh yeah, Fred Neumeier. Fred Neumeier was a former pro baseball, played minor league baseball and had that, it was somebody who was immersed in sport. and actually shot three, directed three sports films subsequently, including another football film, The Quarterback, from 1926. So I think he had a sensibility there about capturing the sport with integrity and authenticity that contributed to how he kind of directed those sequences in particular, that he wanted to try and bring people which I think, as you said, he does very effectively. He wants to literally bring you

into the scrum, into the mayhem at the middle of the field where the camera is on top of the players and is right up against Harold as he's being dragged around the pitch and so on. That kind of immediacy and that intimacy that we get with the players on the pitch is quite powerfully communicated and something I think that he was conscious of trying to realize when he, when he set out on making the film. And of course the, also the other thing for those sequences is that they're, they're integrating actual football sequences into that, that sequence from, uh, from that period. They have the, the, that final sequences integrating, um, the big game in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena that year is part of the

sequence itself and gives you that sense.

So that's where it was shot.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Part of it. I was wondering about that.

Yeah.

That's one of the things about sports.

Just one of the things about sports movies is when, when you see games, sometimes they're shot kind of tight and lit in a, you know, kind of darkened way so they can make it look like there's a full stadium.

And this one obviously is, is the complete opposite.

So I was actually going to ask you about how they shot those atmosphere shots, the shots of the crowd.

Yeah, so they used shots from three different stadiums, from the LA Memorial Coliseum, from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and from the California Memorial Stadium. So they integrated shots from each of those, either when they were fully in the middle of a major game, And then they cleared out, I think, the LA Coliseum was empty when he shot some of those, all the on-pitch sequences were shot there in an empty stadium, but then intercut, obviously, with the actual crowd sequences from the games. But those are fascinating as well of the period. I mean, this is why it's such an important historical document that you're seeing footage from these actual, kind of the experience of a big college game in this period. And even the way in

which Like, I love the scenes at the very beginning where the guys are kind of giving directions to the supporters on how you're going to, which, you know, it's a wonderful kind of book ending of the narrative because, of course, that's how it starts with Harold in his bedroom doing all these kind of moves and gestures. And at the end, you see them enacted in a big game.

And the crowd, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of people repeating those actions again. in an actual big game at the time.

A very silly question for me to end on, considering we've been talking for 45 minutes about how rich this film is as a sports film. And yet I'm still curious to ask you how this movie fits your criteria as a sports film, because for most of its running time, there's hardly any football in it.

And the main character's.

Preoccupation is, is popularity and establishing himself as a success and athletics is not on his mind at all until we get like a lot of great sports films or most sports films do they end with a big game and the big game is what matters. So how, how does this fit in for you, Sean, as, as a sports film, ultimately what, what it certainly checks the thematic boxes.

And as you said, it doesn't even, it doesn't just check them. It, It established most of them. It provided the template in a lot of ways. But how for you does it qualify?

But that's it. It provided the template. But that template being that sports films aren't ultimately about sport. And sport rarely features for more than maybe 10, 15 percent of the actual sequences within a film. And it's very hard to find a sports film that will have more sequences of sports than that. But those sequences will be absolutely critical to defining character. Whoever the central protagonist, who they are and how they demonstrate who they are, sport will be critical to that journey in the narrative. And that's what you see in The Freshman. His whole goal from the very beginning is to find... It's about, yeah, it's a man, a young man trying to find himself in terms of his understanding of what it is to prove

oneself in this moment in the United States. He has this conception inspired by film. And there's a wonderful kind of intertextual commentary within the film. If you remember when he's up in the bedroom, he's looking at, he's got the poster of the college hero on the bedroom wall and the door of his bedroom. Um, fiction film, by the way, that was made two years later by Columbia, perhaps inspired by that, but that was entirely fictional. Um, so.

Is inspiring him towards the character that he might be and the kind of all of the traits and tropes associated with college life. Uh, and he's performing them literally in his room because he thinks that's the man that he needs to be, uh, until Inspired by Peggy, he's told, well, can you not be the man you are rather than the man you think you should be? And sport for him becomes the way to do that, to demonstrate who he is ultimately in the final climactic scene of the film.

And if you look across the sports genre throughout its history, that's one of the kind of main recurring tropes you encounter. It's about sport as the milieu, the space, the sphere within which usually men demonstrate their own kind of masculinity to demonstrate who they are, and less often women. But thankfully, that's improving in recent decades slightly.

I mentioned this to Travis before we started recording, and I don't know if you were, either of you were like me. Growing up in the 80s, I watched the Michael J. Fox movie Teen Wolf probably 150 times. I don't know if they paid anybody anything for this, but Teen Wolf is basically a remake of The Freshman set in high school and basketball and involving the supernatural ability to turn into a werewolf. I mean it is this movie The Freshman because he's got the similar– he's got the girlfriend. He gains popularity by taking on the supernatural ability to play basketball amazingly. He becomes the most popular man on campus in high school and in the end, through his girlfriend– She makes him understand that he needs

to just be himself. And he goes out and he plays the big game against the rival as himself instead of, right, instead.

Of as the wolf. And he triumphs. It's just, it's Teen Wolf.

Boof and Peggy are very similar.

Boof.

They are.

Yeah. And the jock guy too.

He's very much a kind of Chet Trask sort of figure.

The Chet Trask.

Yeah.

Yep.

So this is, they recycle themselves, all of these tropes and these narratives.

This is it. And it's part of the, as you said, the legacy and of the influence of a film like this, that it still, you know, it echoes and it's resonances, even though, you know, 99%, perhaps more of the audience who went to see Teen Wolf had no conception of I would have never seen or perhaps ever heard of The Freshman. And if they did, they would have thought it was a Marilyn Brando film with Matthew Broderick. If you look it up, that's what you'll get even today.

But the resonances of these films carry. They're still there. They're still connecting with people today through the text, the experiences of sports cinema we have.

Yeah, I watched Rookie of the Year a couple of weeks ago with my son, and it was the same thing, you know, same tale.

Yeah, I was just going to say, and I haven't seen, I only started watching it, but it's up and I have to watch it. There's actually, he made a sequel to The Freshman.

The Sin of Harold Diddlebuck.

Yeah, I just watched, I didn't watch the entire thing. I went, I started watching it there earlier today. It looks fascinating. It begins with the final game and then where did Harold go afterwards? And you know what, from what I can gather, he went and tried to, Realize the American dream is a successful businessman.

Yeah, a businessman, like basically, I don't know, some sort of booster, you know, in today's terms, offers him a job. And then apparently he starts working his way up from, you know, somebody who's, you know, just filing papers to somebody who, you know, would get to the executive level, presumably.

But I don't think it works out that well for him.

I haven't seen it, but I was reading that.

But it is an important text also because it's the very last film that Harold Lloyd ever made. So in a way, you could see, I mean, Depression wasn't his first film, but it was his most commercially successful of all of his films. And it was his favorite. He's talked about it as being his favorite films. And when it came to making his last film, that's the film he went back to. And the entire opening sequence is made up. of the end of The Freshman.

I mean, the comedy, the physical comedy really does hold up. Like it is truly funny and it works still very well.

So go out and watch it. Listeners, if you haven't seen it already, go out and watch it. It's up on YouTube. Watch The Freshman. Yeah.

And watch Teen Wolf and not to belabor it, but Teen Wolf 2 is boxing and it takes place in college.

So actually Teen Wolf 2 is probably.

more of a direct corollary to The Freshman now that I think about it. But Sean, this was so much fun talking about The Freshman. Thank you for choosing it and thank you for giving us your time to discuss it.

Thank you for the invitation. It's been a pleasure. Absolutely.

Yeah, Sean, take care of yourself.

Congrats on the podcast. It's a brilliant, brilliant idea to have a podcast dedicated to sports cinema.

Congrats on the second edition of your book.

Thank you. Oh yeah, that's final. For those of you interested, you can find it, Sport and Film. It's up, you know, all good bookshops, I'd say. Well, I don't know if it's in all bookshops, but certainly it's widely available online, a new edition. And I have also a web platform with complimentary resources. It's sportandfilm.eu. For those interested, it has a whole database of being on European cinema. This is something I've been... a related research topic, which is the story of sport outside of the US. The US has made such a massive contribution, of course, to sports cinema.

But there is an incredible story of sports cinema outside of the US in countries across the world. So the database within that platform kind of captures some of that over a thousand European films alone in there that we've catalogued.

We will link to Sean's book and his... resources in our podcast description.

Thanks again.

Thanks a million. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Sean.

The Freshman (1925) with Sean Crosson | Field of Scenes

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