It's sad that the classic Broadway and film comedy Brother Rat was turned into such a mediocre musical. With such an assembly of talent this film should have been far better than it was.
I believe the main problem with About Face is the musical score. Absolutely nothing memorable comes from the songs written by Peter DeRose and Charles Tobias. Maybe with a better score the film might have been better.
Gordon MacRae, Dick Wesson, and Eddie Bracken play the roles that Ronald Reagan, Wayne Morris, and Eddie Albert did in the film version of Brother Rat. The plot is essentially the same about three roommates at a military academy renamed inexplicably State Military Institute. Brother Rat on stage and screen is set at the real Virginia Military Institute. The three cadets get into all kinds of situations, but the main plot line involves Bracken who secretly married and the other two conspire to keep it a secret because the code of the academy says a cadet will be expelled for marrying. That's going to be hard since he married the commandant's daughter without her telling him her real name and relation to Commandant Larry Keating. And Virginia Gibson has something else arriving at the same time that the cadets graduate in June.
Two things struck me while watching About Face. First the whole subject of marriage would be dealt with far more severely in a serious vein in the John Ford classic The Long Grey Line a couple of years later. When young Robert Francis marries in that film, he resigns because of the West Point honor code. Apparently they don't have that at SMI, maybe that's the reason the real VMI was changed to the fictional SMI.
Secondly these cadets act like the police rookies in police academy. I swear the things that the cadets do to some of the authority figures were like what Steve Guttenberg was doing in the Police Academy films. I doubt their hijinks would go over at a real military school.
One bright thing about it was the debut of Joel Grey on the big screen playing the hapless freshman that the three upper classmen delight in tormenting. Just part of the hazing in these places. And lucky for Grey he had one musical number where he got to display his singing, dancing and mimicking talents. He does a really great impression of Jerry Lewis. Grey plays the role previously done by Ezra Stone on stage and William Tracy on screen and he's really great in the part.
About Face could have and should have been better with the talent that went into this film.
