College Confidential is a 1960 American B-movie drama directed by Albert Zugsmith and starring Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows and Mamie Van Doren.
Plot
Sociology professor Steve McInter conducts a survey at Collins College about the lifestyles and sexual urges of the younger generation. The father of one of his students, Sally Blake, confronts McInter about the survey and found that he was having an affair with a female student. Reporter Betty Duquesne receives an anonymous tip that McInter is corrupting the college students. McInter has a party at his house where a student film that had been spliced with a supposedly "pornographic" movie was shown. The professor is arrested and a trial was held where he is charged with corrupting the morals of minors, which attracted the attention of the media. After the trial, McInter attacked the "dirty-mindedness" of the town.
Cast
Steve Allen as Steve McInter
Jayne Meadows as Betty Duquesne
Mamie Van Doren as Sally Blake
Rocky Marciano as Deputy Sheriff
Mickey Shaughnessy as Sam Grover
Cathy Crosby as Fay Grover
Herbert Marshall as Professor Henry Addison
Conway Twitty as Marvin
Randy Sparks as Phil
Pamela Mason as Edna Blake
Elisha Cook, Jr. as Ted Blake
Theona Bryant as Lois Addison
Production
The film was an unofficial follow-up to High School Confidential from two years prior, although made for a different studio. Director Joe Dante, who spoofed said follow-up on the 1979 Ramones vehicle Rock 'n' Roll High School, asked Allen about making College Confidential at one point and the latter said that it was going to be progressive. It has never been available on any home media.
Randy Sparks performed two songs on the film: "College Confidential" and "Playmates", while Conway Twitty performed "College Confidential Ball".
Reception
Howard Thompson of The New York Times thought the picture "best-described as punk", and wrote that "Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows are such personable, alert performers that it is truly painful to find them co-starring in a piece of movie claptrap like College Confidential." The students in the film were described as seemingly "even more adolescent, apparently never touch a book, continually grasp each other instead, or slither around mouthing a kind of steamy, beatnik jargon.". The New York Herald Tribune said of the acting: "Earl Wilson and other members of the fourth estate show up in court to demonstrate their shortcomings as actors..."