Review of Ten Gentlemen from West Point

The earliest years of West Point military academy are colorfully (and fancifully) documented in this serio-comic film. O'Hara plays the influential daughter of a deceased statesman who trades votes for the inception of the academy with dances and kisses. Her fiancé Sutton doesn't mind this terribly as he is one of the first men to sign up for instruction there. While he shows up, complete with luggage and personal valet, she takes over a local tavern in order to be near him and to serve the men in the institution she worked hard to create. Montgomery plays a buck-skinned Kentuckian who enrolls. He and Sutton almost immediately butt heads over issues of decorum and personality and, before long, they are also competing for the affections of O'Hara. The academy is overseen by the rotund and humorless Cregar, who doesn't seem to care if the enterprise succeeds at all. His brigadiers are led by the burly and lunk-headed Bond, who delights in taunting the men and meting out punishment. The rivalry between the recruits and the established soldiers takes up a good portion of the film, culminating in an elaborate plank against the brigadiers and a rough and tumble game of lacrosse between the men. Eventually, the remaining men of the title are pressed into service against Tecumseh and must prove their mettle to the disbelieving Cregar. Montgomery, in one of his early lead roles (though he'd been kicking around in small parts for years) is handsome, charismatic and heroic. He shows quite a bit of animation and enthusiasm and does a fine job with his role. O'Hara is lovely in the extreme and gets a chance to show off many sides. Her role is one with a feminist slant as she portrays someone who is not ruled by men in an era when men pretty much ran the show. Sutton is rather hard to take at times. His thin voice and effete manner, though deliberately intended to contrast with Montgomery, are nonetheless a bit irksome. Eventually, his character develops enough to overcome this, but one does wonder what O'Hara sees in him to begin with. This is not among Cregar's best work. His expressions have a hint of amusement in them that don't fit the character and he often looks rather silly, dwarfing everyone in his shadow (never more so than when he's hog-tied near the ending.) He's not terrible, but he was capable of far better work than is displayed here. Dale appears to nice advantage as O'Hara's chaperone and helper. The story of raw recruits being transformed into fighting men has been told countless times over the years and this instance is neither among the best or the worst. Parts of it are quite captivating and entertaining while other parts are silly and ridiculous, though much of the humor here is intentional. Once scene has a burro sitting on top of Bond after having kicked him in the behind several times! Possible homoerotic humor can be gleaned from seeing the recruits in drag (!) and riding two to a cannon during one of their punishments. There's more than a little bit of name-dropping (George Washington, Benedict Arnold, etc…) and tweaking of history, but it winds up being an enjoyable little film. A patriotic finale flashes the portraits of famous men who were graduated from West Point from its inception up to the time the movie was shot.