About a score of years ago the heart of Harvard University was torn with maddened anguish. A Radcliffe lady--Mrs. Ride Johnson Young--had perpetrated a play called "Brown of Harvard." It was like nothing the staid precincts of the Harvard Yard had ever seen or hoped to see. Conservative alumni gnashed their teeth in impotent frenzy. Undergraduates, not conservative at all, greeted the Boston opening of the play with senescent garden produce.
The fate of "brown of Harvard," when it appeared in a revival a short time later as a musical comedy, was little happier. On this occasion, the resourceful undergraduate abandoned vegetables for alarm clacks, and pretty chorus ladies were driven off the stage in a panic by a barrage of time pieces. "Brown of Harvard" was thereafter permitted to slumber for several years, until at last a movie producer nosed it out.
It was with a shock that Harvard learned, the other day, that the thing they thought dead had come to life again. And what a life. The whole freshman class arrives at Cambridge on one subway train, all playing ukuleles, all munching apples, according to the saddened reviewer of the Harvard CRIMSON. All the street and traffic signs in Hollywood must have been requisitioned to adorn the students rooms. California cactus hedges are interspersed among a few authentic Harvard scenes.
Unkindest cut of all, it was a Yale man Donald Ogden Stewart of Yale who adapted the original "Brown" to the screen. Written by Radcliffe, revamped by Yale. Any one knowing what a Harvard student thinks of these two contemporary centers of learning will not wonder that the CRIMSON reviewer, while realizing the futility of bombarding the inanimate screen, still holds that the projection of even a strictly fresh egg would help tremendously in relieving the feelings. Chicago Tribune.
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NIL ADMIRARI