Almost seven decades ago, alumni Budd Schulberg '36 and Maurice Rapf '35 attempted to incorporate the "Dartmouth Spirit" into a Hollywood motion picture titled "Winter Carnival." What they achieved was somewhere between classic and chaos.
"It's not easy, you know, to cram the whole of this 'Dartmouth Spirit' into a Carnival story and really grasp it. It's a whole year's job -- and there are plenty of headaches," screenwriter Schulberg told The Dartmouth in 1939.
One of the biggest headaches was caused by intended co-writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose drunken antics in fraternity basements slowed the production of the script. Although he worked with Schulberg on some of the script, Fitzgerald was ultimately fired after a notorious drunken episode outside the Hanover Inn. Fitzgerald did not receive any mention in the film's credits, yet his contribution to the script is still evident.
"You can see the two different story lines in the script. Fitzgerald was trying to tell a typical Fitzgerald story of lost love between two mature people. I was trying to tell a different story altogether," Schulberg said in a much later second interview with The Dartmouth in 1998.
The story is set around Dartmouth's "Outdoor Evening," a Friday night event started at 1928's Winter Carnival, where the "Queen of the Snows" is crowned. The plot focuses on former duchess Jill Baxter (Anne Sheridan), a former Winter Carnival Queen who comes back to Dartmouth and runs into former flame and current Dartmouth professor John Weldon (Richard Carlson).
Other story lines that run through the haphazard movie include Jill's younger sister Anne trying to claim her spot among the Snow Queens to Jill's involvement with a count to a 15-year-old girl pretending to be a college student.
The movie is truly a product of its time with its use of sled taxis as a mode of transportation and the overuse of soft focus close-ups as a cinematic means to demonstrate physical beauty or romantic feelings.
The funniest aspect of the movie is its unintentionally comic dialogue, which is full of strange 1930s expressions. Main characters throw around words such as "anarchist!" as petty insults. In another scene, a freshman reporter for the College's daily newspaper, which is based on The Dartmouth, apologizes to the editor for his absentmindedness, saying, "Sorry Chief, but you know how Carnival upsets a man's equilibrium."
A reviewer for the New Republic wrote, "Maybe it will be required seeing where the ivy twines, but I don't know when I've seen so many unaccomplished actors in so many embarrassing complications .... The story is a disgrace to freshman composition."
The film crew spent six hectic days in Hanover filming carnival events and college life to collect background footage for the movie's action scenes, which were to be filmed later in Hollywood. The crew interrupted trains arriving in White River Junction Station so they could take repeated shots of trains pulling into the station. They also convinced the Town of Hanover to turn on the streetlights in the early afternoon in order to make a scene work.
The film is available for borrowing at the Jones Media Center.
