All-American Co-ed


All-American Co-ed is a 1941 American musical film produced and directed by Leroy Prinz as a Hal Roach Streamliner for release by United Artists. It stars Frances Langford, Johnny Downs, Marjorie Woodworth, Noah Beery Jr., Esther Dale, Harry Langdon, and The Tanner Sisters.

Plot

Quinceton College Zeta fraternity stages a revue with members in drag. The resulting publicity catches the attention of newspaperman Hap Holden and Virginia Collinge. They convince Virginia's aunt Matilda Collinge, president of failing Mar Brynn, to refute the school's staid image by sponsoring a contest awarding a dozen free scholarships aimed at "unusual girls", winners of pageants for fruits, vegetables and flowers, as women most likely to succeed and to be showcased in a musical presentation during the Fall Festival.
To publicize the contest, President Collinge pokes fun at Zeta members as being least likely to succeed and bans them from their campus. For revenge the Zeta chapter president Bob Sheppard is coerced to infiltrate Mar Brynn by entering the contest as "Bobbie DeWolfe, Queen of the Flowers". After falling in love with Virginia, Bob comes clean and assists in staging the show, but includes in the finale a Busby Berkeley-style spelling out of "Zeta" as revenge for the ban.

Cast

"Out of the Silence", music and lyrics by Lloyd B. Norlin, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song of 1941. It lost to Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's The [Last Time I Saw Paris |"The Last Time I Saw Paris]", from Lady [Be Good |Lady Be Good].