Campus fanfare in the l920s with Peter Lawford, the captain of the football team, a campus heart-throb, needing to pass his French exam so that he can play in the football game. Of course, June Allyson is called in to tutor him, the same girl he broke a prom date with so that he could escort the new girl on campus, a snob-seeking status girl, only interested in money.

I just love these so called college musicals where academics is never really the focus, but rather good old fashion fun.

What makes this film a delight is the singing and dancing. While Lawford's voice could have been better, he does fairly well nonetheless. Allyson, who was 30 at the time the movie was made, looks like a college co-ed all the way.

Mel Torme has his moments as a college student as well.

Good News was the best musical from the Roaring Twenties from the premier songwriting team of DeSylva,Brown&Henderson. It ran on Broadway for 557 performances in the 1927-29 season and gave the team a number of song hits identified with them like the title song, Just Imagine, Lucky In Love, and The Best Things In Life Are Free. All of those songs made it as well as one of the great dance numbers of the Roaring Twenties, The Varsity Drag.

The musicals of that era had the lightweight nonsensical plots which also was taken from the Broadway show. Big man on campus, Peter Lawford, has to get a passing grade in French to stay eligible for the football squad. He gets mousy student librarian June Allyson assigned as a tutor and the inevitable happens as it does in these films. After that Lawford has to choose between mercenary coed Patricia Marshall and Allyson. It's a struggle, but you guess who he winds up with.

This film is strictly about the music and dance numbers and it offers a rare opportunity to see Joan McCracken singing and dancing which she mostly did on the Broadway stage. She introduces a song especially written for the film Pass That Peace Pipe which was a big hit in 1947 and won for Good News its only Academy Award nomination. Pass That Peace Pipe lost to Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah for Best Song. But the number is one of the best dance numbers ever to come from an Arthur Freed produced MGM musical. Joan McCracken died way too young as oddly enough her dancing partner Ray McDonald.

Good News presents an idealized version of the Roaring Twenties and is the quintessential college musical which flooded Hollywood mostly in the years before World War II. It holds up well as entertainment and the songs are still fabulous.

Despite winning an Oscar for one of its songs, "Good News" appears to be a strictly second-tier sort of musical with little to distinguish it. The plot is paper-thin, the singing a bit suspect and the film very light and forgettable.

The film is set at Tait College in 1927 (though, oddly, the women's hair and many of the dresses are strictly 1940s). The plot hinges on whether the school's star quarterback (Peter Lawford) will pursue a snobbish new student (Patricia Marshall) or recognize how wonderful the assistant librarian (June Allyson) is. The plot doesn't get any deeper than that!

Like all musicals, the film is chock full of singing as well as dance numbers. However, I was amazed at the mediocrity (at best) of most of the singing. Apart from Mel Tormé (who had a great voice),the singers are either adequate (such as Allyson) or pretty awful (Lawford--who NEVER should have been allowed to sing in a musical). The songs, while bouncy, are pretty much fluff--which works perfectly with the plot, which is also pure fluff. Overall, the film isn't unpleasant but it also isn't very good or memorable. Strictly a second-tier sort of film from MGM.

By the way, I thought it awfully funny that when Allyson was supposedly teaching Lawford French, she would say words in French and invariably, Lawford's pronunciation (of words he'd never supposedly heard before) was as good or better!