Saturday’s Heroes (1937)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) At a length of barely 60 minutes, I’m not sure that Saturday’s Heroes should be called a movie — I’m sure it must have been commercially viable back then (perhaps as part of a double-bill?) but by today’s standards it straddles the line between feature and featurette. There are two reasons to watch it, though: The first being Van Heflin in one of his earliest starring roles as a star college football player. Heflin is in good form here, showing some of the quiet assurance bordering on arrogance that would mark some of his best turns later during his career. But it’s the second reason to see the film that’s perhaps more interesting. Rather than offer a sanitized, unquestioning, wholesome picture of American college football as the pride of the nation, Saturday’s Heroes gets interested in the exploitation of amateur student-athletes (barely able to survive without scalping tickets) even as the university makes plenty of money from their efforts. That’s a contemporary viewpoint far more modern than the football pictures at the time, and there’s some quiet surprise in encountering a 1937 film that is already poking at that thorny issue. Otherwise, well, it is a 60-minute film: not quite enough to do justice to its various subplots and characters. Still, this is a great pick for Heflin fans looking at the actor’s earliest featured roles.