This second film version of the DeSylva/Brown/Henderson Broadway musical Good News may not be the best of the Arthur Freed-produced MGM musicals, but it's certainly one of the peppiest. The film is set at Tait college during the Roaring 20s. The wisp of a plot involves Tait football-star Peter Lawford, who will be ineligible to play in the Big Game if his grades don't improve. June Allyson is the demure Tait coed who takes on the task of tutoring Lawford, while campus vamp Patricia Marshall takes action when she believes (rightly so) that she is losing Lawford to Allyson. The film is deftly stolen by comic relief Joan McCracken, who stops the show with her energetic rendition of "Pass That Peace Pipe"-which, like the famous Lawford/Allyson duet "The French Lesson," was specially written for this 1948 version of Good News. Retained from the original score is the rousing "Varsity Drag." Mel Torme, Tom Dugan and Donald McBride are among the familiar supporting-cast faces in this bubbly Technicolor musical, which was adapted for the screen by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

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With boundless enthusiasm and enough jive to meld '20s flapper giddiness with '40s swing, 1947's Good News the feature directing debut of Charles Walters (Easter Parade, The Unsinkable Molly Brown) and screenwriting debut of Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon) is "one of the best of the lighthearted rah-rah collegiate musicals" (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker). Peter Lawford (as a campus football hero) and June Allyson (she's the brainiac who tutors him) lead a high-spirited cast that includes Mel Torm and Broadway's Joan McCracken. And The Varsity Drag and Best Song Oscar nominee Pass That Peace Pipe stand out among the numbers that are all zip and joy. And the bee's knees.