The Male Animal is a thoroughly satisfying screen version of the James Thurber-Elliot Nugent Broadway play of the same name, due in large part to the fact that coauthor Nugent both adapted and directed the property for the screen. Henry Fonda stars as bespectacled, bookish college professor Tommy Turner, who puts his career on the line by insisting upon standing up for his right to free speech. Determining to read a letter written by executed anarchistic Bartolomeo Vanzetti to his classroom,Tommy not only risks dismissal and castigation by the conservative college trustees, but seriously jeopardizes his marriage to his wife Ellen (Olivia DeHavilland), who wishes that Tommy would stop making waves and start lobbying for a raise. Coinciding with all this is the arrival of former college football star Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who many years earlier had been Tommy's rival for Ellen's affections. Eminently successful and aggressively athletic, Joe seems to be everything that Tommy isn't, and the little professor is worried that he's going to lose Ellen to Joe after all. An all-night drinking session with equally idealistic student Michael Barnes (Herbert Anderson) convinces Tommy to stick to his principles no matter what the cost-and miracle of miracles, this resolve makes him a hero in everyone's eyes, including sweet Ellen. In the original play, Tommy was never heard reading the Vanzetti letter, but the seriocomic thrust of the film demanded that he would read the controversial missive in the climactic scene. To defuse potential criticism against this scene, Elliot Nugent hastily wrote a new dialogue exchange in which Prof. Turner articulated his right to introduce new ideas to his students, even if he didn't happen to agree with those ideas himself. Nugent's strategy worked, and the Vanzetti letter finale is one of the best scenes in the picture. Equally memorable is the film's brilliant parody of a "typical" football-game rally, in which all the principal speakers parrot the phrase "Get out there-and fight!" The Male Animal was remade in 1952 as
She's Working Her Way Through College, with the liberal ideology of the original film sacrificed in favor of McCarthy-era banalities. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide