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 child 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 in a Boat screenwriter Lewis R. Foster and largely retired from film roles just a few years later.

Brian Belak