High Time (1960) starring Bing Crosby, Fabian, Tuesday Weld (2012) (1960)

Blake Edwards' 1960 Fox comedy HIGH TIME finds Bing Crosby's hamburger-restaurant chain entrepreneur deciding to head back to campus and get his college degree. As the elder statesman on campus, Bing quickly becomes popular with his roommates (including Richard Beymer and Fabian), romances a French teacher (Nicole Maurey) and finds the time to dress up in drag and croon a future standard in the process.

Though written by Edwards' frequent collaborators Tom and Frank Waldman, "High Time" doesn't have a whole lot of slapstick antics (there's just that one bit where Bing crossdresses as part of a fraternity initiation something that's never as amusing as it sounds). The movie is sweet and goes down nice and easy as a product of its era, but it also feels flimsy like a book for a musical without any songs. Yes, Bing does briefly croon "The Second Time Around," a lovely Sammy Cahn-James Van Heusen tune written for the film, but the movie really could've used some more musical interludes seeing as most of the film is comprised of basic, albeit peppy, montages. There's not much in the way of drama or character development here just a series of self-contained scenes set over the course of Bing's four years at an ACC institution dubbed "Pinehurst College" (standing in for Wake Forest, where the film was reportedly supposed to be shot until the production decided to stay closer to home in California).

The supporting cast has its charms: Gavin MacLeod has some fun early on as a manic science teacher, a pre-"Batgirl" Yvonne Craig plays an intrepid school journalist, and Tuesday Weld brings her warm smile as the gang's resident gal pal, but there's no real pay off to their (or any other) roles, with the movie settling for a cartoony treatment of the subject matter without much development or even laughs (in fact, Rodney Dangerfield would have much more success in the latter department in his similarly-themed 1986 hit "Back to School").

Now, although it probably sounds as if I'm being a bit harsh on "High Time," I still enjoyed the film. Edwards' direction utilizes some visual flourishes that would come to characterize his later comedies, and Henry Mancini's wonderful score is so infectious that I was humming the main theme for some time afterwards. All it needed was a few good musical numbers to put it over the top.

The 1080p AVC encoded, Fox-sourced HD transfer is perfectly acceptable on balance the elements are certainly in better condition than "Demetrius and the Gladiators," another Fox Cinemascope TT release, yet the image has some obvious digital filtering applied and doesn't appear nearly as vibrant as TT's recent Blu-Ray of "Bye Bye Birdie" (the colors also don't leap off the screen as they do in TT's counterpart release this month). The DTS MA stereo sound is just fine, with a stereo isolated score track of Mancini's score also available on a separate channel. The original trailer and Julie Kirgo's notes put the finishing touches on another Twilight Time 3000-copy limited edition Blu-Ray.