Archival Print!

Introduced by Mike Mashon

Mike Mashon is Curator, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.

Make love not baccalaureates is the randy message of this early thirties film. Betty and Michael, pent-up, panting students, have a tiff when Betty goes for a spin with the campus Casanova. In drunken retaliation, Michael hits on Dora, a knockout of a waitress at the nearby college cafe. He wakes the next morning to Dora's dad and a double-gauge shotgun, figuratively speaking of course. Consensually comic, The Age of Consent is also an unexpectedly risqué glimpse of 1930s campus mores, professing a kind of post-flapper flipness. In one delectable scene, director LaCava's camera goes from booth to booth in the college hangout, eavesdropping on the oh-so-modern mashing: "There's nothing free about my love, Romeo." Meanwhile, reunited Betty and Michael finish their anatomy lesson and are ready to advance to the chapter on reproduction. Their big dilemma: to drop their drawers, they must drop their courses.