Eight Girls in a Boat

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Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Screening 1 of 4

Hearst Metrotone News: “The Wellesley Crew!”

Year: 1947
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 1 min.
Digital. B&W.

Screening 2 of 4

Hearst Metrotone News: “Wellesley Girls Crew Race” (excerpt)

Year: 1957
Country: U.S.
Runtime: 30 sec.
Digital. B&W. Silent.

Screening 3 of 4

Hearst Metrotone News: “Water Skiing In Mountain Resorts, Lake Arrowhead, Calif.” (excerpt)

Year: 1936
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 1 min.
Digital. B&W.

Screening 4 of 4

Eight Girls in a Boat

Year: 1934
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 85 min.
Digital. B&W.

At an all-girls school in Switzerland, Christa Storm (Dorothy Wilson) is a star pupil and stroke seat on the rowing team, but her clandestine affair with young chemist David Perrin (Douglass Montgomery) from another college leads her into trouble when she discovers she’s pregnant. As Christa’s attention in school slips, she incurs the discipline of the team’s steely coach, Hannah (Kay Johnson), who removes her from the boat and threatens expulsion. Worse, Christa’s businessman father (Walter Connelly) objects to marriage between Christa and David over concerns that David’s studies doom him to a life of poverty. How will Christa and her coming baby keep an even keel through all this choppy water?

This pre-Code film was a remake of a 1932 German original (Acht Mädels im Boot) and billed as “America’s daring reply to Mädchen in Uniform (1931).” Paramount’s advertising played up the salacious suggestion of a female-only school where men are forbidden. Most of the cast members were selected through a nationwide beauty contest aimed at filling out the ensemble with new faces to Hollywood, including Jean Rogers of Flash Gordon (1936). Silent film star Peggy-Jean “Baby Peggy” Montgomery (also known as Diana Serra Cary), now a teenager, appears as one of the students.

Mostly filmed on location at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, Eight Girls in a Boat shines during its rowing scenes as sunlight dapples on the water. The New York Times praised director Richard Wallace’s “considerable delicacy and tact” around the illicit motherhood theme and Dorothy Wilson’s “genuinely and shyly touching” portrayal of “the girl’s loneliness, her sense of ostracism and shame.” Wilson, known for being cast as the lead in The Age of Consent (1932) while working as a secretary at RKO, eventually married Eight Girls screenwriter Lewis R. Foster and largely retired from film roles just a few years later.—Brian Belak

Production: Charles R. Rogers Productions, Inc. Distribution: Paramount Pictures. Producer: Charles R. Rogers. Director: Richard Wallace. Screenwriters: Helmut Brandis, Lewis R. Foster, Casey Robinson. Cinematographer: Gilbert Warrenton. With: Dorothy Wilson, Douglass Montgomery, Kay Johnson, Walter Connelly, Peggy-Jean “Baby Peggy” Montgomery.

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Packard Humanities Institute from the 35mm original nitrate picture negative, acetate composite fine grain positive and nitrate print. Laboratory services by The PHI Stoa Film Lab, Audio Mechanics, Simon Daniel Sound. Special thanks to the Library of Congress, NBCUniversal, David Stenn.