Salute Reviews

It's the old story of the Army versus the Navy on a gridiron battlefield. John Randall (George O'Brien) is the Army freshman player who's a whiz on both the football field and the dance floor. Paul (William Janney) is his younger brother, the Navy's dream boy. When they meet at the final climactic game, it's a 6-6 tie, with both brothers scoring the only touchdown for their respective teams. This was only the second talkie to be directed by John Ford, who makes good use of locations at Annapolis. The director also shot isolated footage of the "reel" game and intercut it with newsreel footage of a real game, probably an Army-Princeton contest from the fall of 1928. Look for a minor appearance by John Wayne and Ward Bond as football players who haze Janney's character. Bond and Wayne, at the time, were both on the football team at the University of Southern California. Ford brought the entire USC football team with him to Annapolis; when a pair of speaking parts were called for, he gave the small roles to Bond and Wayne (the latter had worked for Ford during school vacations as a laborer and prop man, and was well liked by the director, the crew, and O'Brien, the star). Ford had the advantage of generous cooperation from the superintendent of the Naval Academy, who had been a great friend of his father. (They were both from Peak's Island, Maine.)