For those who had thought that football movies had died out with Red Grange's "One Minute to Play," the Universal production. "Saturdays Millions" will come as a distinct surprise. Yet other than its tardiness, the picture has some other novelties: the hero is not quite so noble, the coach not quite so tough, and the heroine not quite so saccharine as their 1929 predecessors.

Jim Fowler, star and mainstay of the Western team breaks training the night before the big game to visit a girl whom he has known for several months. She reveals that she is married, and that her husband, who had some money on the game, would consider it a great favor if Fowler didn't play the next day, and would blackmail him if he did. Asserting his righteous scorn and little pugilistic ability, our hero breaks his hand, but is rescued by his friends before further damage can be done. During the game, handicapped by the pain in his hand, he fails to come up to the expectations of Western cohorts, in fact, he drops a last minute pass that would have won for dear old Western. For the benefit of the gum-chewing habitues of Boston's second balconies, however, the ending is a happy one.

Oddly enough the directors have seen fit to omit those scenes so common to cinema colleges: there are no freshman skull-caps in evidence, no beauteous co-eds roller-skating on the campus and no fraternity initiations. Considering that it has taken only four years for Hollywood genius to advance from the nauseating stupidity of the Red Grange opus to the amiable nonsense of "Saturday's Millions," a naturally optimistic soul might find reason to believe that it will not be more than forty years before a really good football movie is produced.