Dancing Co-Ed

Dancing Co-EdHer hair isn't yet platinum and her makeup is still more girlish than glamorous, but Lana Turner is nonetheless "a walking acetylene torch" in her first top billing, playing a dancer planted in a big Midwest college to win a rigged Hollywood contest. The prize: the starring role in a big movie musical. The complications: plenty, especially when the co ed falls for a crusading college newshound (Richard Carlson) who suspects the contest is as phony as

George Smith has a breakthrough idea: chuck it all and go meet the one real artist he admires

packed with kicky dance montages offering pre-Code chorines and Berkeley-like kaleidoscopic shots

Don Carlos' sadistic cousin

Although it turns out that she is actually an adopted orphan

Gable plays jim Branch

and at a handful of kooks crazy enough to care

the film won the support of William Randolph Hearst

Joan Crawford stripped to her teddy and tore into a Charleston powered by a zillion watts of sexual energy - and shocked the corsets and cravats off parents who'd heard disturbing rumblings of what their children were up to

The victim of idle tongues and meddling people

And Laughton (who shed fifty pounds for the role) plays Edward Moulton-Barrett

narrow escapes

slapstick and quirky vocal mannerisms