Blue Blood and Bevo

A moon-lit Austin campus, 1917: cadet Billy West, all elbows and bravado, smuggles a jug of illicit Bevo near-brew into the barracks, sparking a chain-reaction of collegiate delirium that ricochets from the Gothic arches of the old gym to the cottony banks of the Colorado. His sidekick, Sidney Smith—part mime, part satyr—pilfers a ceremonial sword, fencing with shadows while James Parrott’s shutterbug freshman documents every pratfall on a hand-cranked camera destined for posterity. Charles Dorety’s barrel-chested cattle baron arrives to endow the university, but a tipsy baton twirler misplaces the check inside a tuba, sending the philanthropist on a berserk chase through lecture halls, polo fields, and a sorority house where flappers recite Latin conjugations between Charleston kicks. The film climaxes in a hallucinatory bonfire rally: Bevo, the temperance-era near-beer, transmutes into a spectral longhorn that stampedes across the forty-acre campus, scattering ROTC formations, while West, now stripped to union suit and dignity, lassos the moon and drags it low enough to brand it with the university seal. Order restored, diplomas flutter down like albino leaves; the jug, now empty, becomes a trophy atop the governor’s mantel, its glass sweating the last drops of a vanished adolescence.