1960s

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1960s

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
A popular early sitcom in the vein of Leave It To Beaver, with a bit more zip, sees in this clip the spoiled rich kid contemplating what happens if he doesn't go to Yale.


House On Bare Mountain
Honestly when this collection project started, I didn't expect to find Vassar in one pornographic film let alone four (see also Nasty Lady, A Taste of Money, and The Grafenberg Spot. This is softcore, just wall to wall bare breasts, the kind of film that would be shown at stag parties, or so I imagine. The "plot" involves Frankenstein and Dracula watching all these nude bathing beauties, and no that's not a typo. The reference comes early and I ran the clip long enough to give a NSFW taste of what most of the rest of this is like.


The Young Savages
Burt Lancaster stars in a strong drama, directed by John Frankenheimer; he plays an assistant D.A. helping an ex-girlfriend's son who has been accused of murdering a member of a rival street gang. 


Leave It to Beaver (2 episodes)
Sitcoms are a major component of the collection, and we start early with Leave it to Beaver. The scenes are drawn from two different episodes—and we get two different tropes: one about men attending, and one about how the girls who attend are too intelligent/forceful/demonstrative.
Thanks to Renee Mesard ’89 and Becca Worthington for the tip.

Perry Mason
On this classic legal-drama show, the wonderful James Coburn meets someone’s wife, and she’s not what he expected in a Vassar grad. His expectations were more toward the studious and, apparently, unattractive.


The Beverly Hillbillies (9 episodes)
It’s fairly well known in TV circles that the Beverly Hillbillies character Miss Jane Hathaway was a Vassar graduate. My obsessive desire for completeness here did find its limits, as I couldn’t bring myself to watch all 270 episodes. However, as she’s a secondary character, I did watch all of her scenes, and in all that material, I located (with help from RJ Dorn) only nine references: from the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 9th seasons. (Vassar went co-ed around the 6th season.) I suspect there are other references--unfortunately the episode files I've been able to obtain are drawn from TBS reruns that would cut scenes for a shorter time frame, and PlutoTV runs complete episodes only from season 1-7. The references here don't seem memorable enough to have made her status as a Vassar girl so well-known.


77 Sunset Strip
Classic television's L.A.-private detective show has this scene between two regulars: one of the PIs and the hipster valet attendant at the club next door to their office. Including the credits because they're really...something. 
Thanks to RJ Dorn for the tip.

Take Her, She’s Mine
The 1960s counterculture was starting to drift into movies. (See also Skidoo.) This comedy is about how college students in the early ’60s worried their parents as they began to participate in the counterculture. Sandra Dee sings Hava Nagila in this one— a scene that’s pretty fascinating in its own right, but our interest here lies in this near-final scene. Jimmy Stewart, her father, is in a meeting called by his social club to kick him out because of his strange behavior over the past months. He explains through the movie that it’s all because of his trying to keep his daughter out of trouble. And in this final scene, when the club is getting ready to render its judgment, it turns out, he’s not the only one.
Thanks to Angela David Beatty ’93 for the tip.

Robin and the 7 Hoods
The Rat Pack was fun in spirit but their movies were sure lousy. It makes sense for Vassar to make an appearance here, in the person of a sultry temptress who walks in and knocks Frank on his ear. A character point only, but we’re now beginning to see more Vassar girls being sexually forward.


Goodbye Charlie
This clip isn’t such a great scene, but interesting in that it references the Daisy Chain. Debbie Reynolds is playing a man—Tony Curtis’s partner in various criminal enterprises –who died and came back in the body of a gorgeous blonde. For the most part, tedium ensues; it’s not that funny and a misfire from a good director (Vincente Minnelli). Our scene is fairly deep into the movie, where Reynolds is beginning to enjoy life as a woman, even becoming more of one, and thinks about marrying the big gambler who killed her former, male self.


Viva Las Vegas
Another musical clip, from one of the collection’s two Elvis films. (See Girl Happy just below.) A pretty funny lyric that rhymes Vassar, and it’s performed by the great ’60s icon, Ann-Margret. The song is about how her rival for her boyfriend’s attention is his race car.
Thanks to E. Kanner for the tip.

Girl Happy
The King himself sings about Vassar in a tune by Lenore Rosenblatt and Victor Millrose. For another Elvis-movie entry (though Elvis isn’t in the scene), see Viva Las Vegas.


The Munsters
A sitcom to cash in on the popularity of The Addams Family, this family of movie monsters had a horny grandfather. It’s the same joke, basically, as The Road to Bali, about ogling women at Vassar.


The Lucy Show
Lucille Ball's followup to I Love Lucy, this scene has her trying to scam the stingy bank manager into providing money to help her friend.



The Star Wagon
A filmed play from 1966 with Dustin Hoffman in a very early role. Orson Bean is a corporate inventor who’s created a time machine as a side project; his boss doesn’t like him working on personal projects and fires him before he can use it. Bean hires Richard Castellano (of later “Leave the gun; take the cannoli”-Godfather fame) to help him move it out of his lab, but the thug has other plans. And a sense of humor, apparently, in the men-at-Vassar vein.


The Addams Family
Another classic '60s sitcom and another Vassar joke. The Addams are a wealthy and high-class family of assorted monsters (vampires, Frankensteins, disembodied hands, etc.). But their wealth and privilege drives the joke here.
Thanks to Bennett Cohen '83 for the tip to the show, and Richard Dorn '82 for pointing out the particular episode.

Batman
How can you not love this? A campy, self-knowing show, the villains were often played for comic effect. These villains weren’t regulars, but as Vassar-as-character-point references go, this is definitely the most outlandish. And interesting as it’s about Vassar faculty rather than students, and ACDC (later known as the Deece or Gordon Commons) gets a reference to boot.


The Sand Pebbles
This drama is set in early 20th-century China. Here a number of sailors are visiting the local bar/whorehouse, and the new girl—who’s uncommonly pretty and has better English than most—occasions comment.


Gilligan’s Island (2 episodes)
What’s a major ’60s sitcom without a reference? Drawn from two episodes, both scenes of course involve the wealthy, stuffy Howells. The jokes don’t really make a lot of sense.
Thanks to Noriko Ellen Okamoto for the tip.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
The classic Frank Loesser musical has a fairly funny Vassar joke...but it didn’t make it into the movie version. Happily, the current Broadway season has a revival, so with a bootleg recording from the theater, I can finally present it here, edited into the movie. Apologies for video quality and distance at the end here—I was in the back row of the theater balcony. In the scene, Robert Morse is hoodwinking his boss into thinking that he too went to the boss’s alma mater, Old Ivy. He also pretends to be an experienced knitter, knowing that the boss is passionate about it. In the stage version, after the leads exit, two janitors hear the end of their song about Old Ivy, and then they find the knitting. A gender-role joke ensues.
Thanks to Rachel Milligan ’96 for the tip.

A Fine Madness
This swinging-60's sex comedy shows "genius, poet, and carpet cleaner" Sean Connery hard at work seducing secretaries. 
Thanks to Zach Sherman '16 for the tip

The Phyllis Diller Show
A comedy icon of the 60s, the conceit of this show was a Beverly Hillbillies in reverse (sort of) -- they're an eccentric wealthy family but the IRS came after them for back taxes. The government decides to allow to them continue living in the mansion while paying because the nation looks up to them and it would cause a depression if they had to give up everything. So the series was a bunch of wacky schemes for raising money and staving off the government. Anyway, it's just a costume point but pegs Phyllis as a Vassar graduate.
Thanks to Richard Dorn '82 for the catch.

The Monkees
More ’60s icons, the Monkees on this episode of their TV show won a contest and are posing for a high-fashion mag. The various models in the scene are introduced as coming from the Seven Sisters and similar high-end colleges. Vassar as character point: well-bred, beautiful, and elite.


Skidoo
If you’ve never heard of this movie, I’m not surprised. It’s a legendary mess and it deserves all the scorn it’s received and then some. I couldn’t explain what’s happening if I tried. Suffice it to say there’s hippies and gangsters and Groucho Marx is playing God and the ending credits are sung and you need a lot drugs for this to make any sense. Jackie Gleason is wealthy and is sending his hippie daughter to Vassar.  Ultimately it’s another film that mocks the 1960s counterculture (see Take Her, She’s Mine, for a more sedate entry of that type.)

More Dead Than Alive
A minor Western with ex-convict Clint Walker trying to find work and purpose after being released from jail. He runs across Anne Francis, an artist, and romance begins to bloom as we learn a bit about her.

Star!
This is a fairly bloated screen musical about Gertrude Lawrence, starring Julie Andrews at the height of her career. In the climactic number, she sings “The Saga of Jenny,” a number Lawrence made famous from the Weill/Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark—which has a great lyric that references Vassar. (This song also appears in the 1944 movie of Lady in the Dark, and the 1954 television production.) The scene from the show is set in a dream sequence of a trial conducted by a circus.


The Swimmer
A rather maudlin entry, as a depressed Burt Lancaster reminisces about an old affair with his former, embittered mistress. Vassar as character point, but it’s a bit throwaway, not as clear what it’s supposed to signify.


Laugh-In
The enormously popular sketch show is wildly dated now and our four Vassar jokes that came up in the second and third seasons range from hacky to incomprehensible.


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