"High Time" is a decent little time passer--pleasant but also not especially deep or significant. It begins with a rich older man, Harvey Howard (Bing Crosby) deciding to go to college. His snobby kids are dead against it but surprisingly the kids at the college take to Harvey very well and he forges many friendships as well as spends time with a pretty French teacher.Like most films about college, you rarely see the folks going to classes, though there is more studying than usual! My only gripes about this film are two...the ending where Harvey 'flies' is pretty dumb and the relationship with the French teacher is oddly flat and unsatisfying. Not a bad film by any means but not one you should rush to see.

High Time is a wonderful Bing Crosby vehicle that has a successful middle aged businessman with grown children (and a widower) indulging a whim by taking a step back in his life to get the college education he missed the first time around.While a seeming slam dunk to be a "fish out of water" comedy, instead Crosby's character finds a way to integrate successfully with his younger classmates, learning from them as they also benefit from his experience.The movie records a lot of the college experience as you would have found it in the 50s or early 60s. It was a more innocent, more friendly time, with school spirit, dorms, frats, cramming, and the excitement of coming back together to start each new school year.This is a wonderful film that stands up well. Things such as fall bonfires were and still are common campus traditions. Fraternity pledging pranks ... still around. Dormitories ... still around. Hamburger/Barbecue restaurants ... still around. LOLIs the movie a touch simple and innocent compared to modern life and modern comedy fare? Sure it is. But trust me, that is NOT a bad thing.Sit back and enjoy this very entertaining and relaxing film.

I discovered this delightful film in the late 1980s when I saw it on TV and enjoyed it immensely. Bing Crosby gives a wonderful performance in this film and exudes a warmth much like that in "White Christmas" (1954) and Nicole Maurey does an excellent job as his French teacher/love interest. The duo of Tuesday Weld and Fabian add 1960 star power, and this is a great opportunity to see a young Gavin MacLeod and Yvonne Craig before they became even more famous as TV stars. Patrick Adiarte is also wonderful as Indian student T.J. Padmanabham. The story is well crafted and involving and of course family friendly, perhaps the most family friendly of Blake Edwards' work. The Henry Mancini soundtrack is IMHO one of his best and will stick with you for a long time. (It was available on CD but is currently out of print.) Of course any time you hear a Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn song it's a treat, and "The Second Time Around" is one of their best.As far as highlights, the scene when the gang visits one of Harvey's own Smokehouses will have you both laughing and pining for a time when such restaurants existed. You could see the movie's end stunt coming a mile away, given Harvey's fondness for the key phrase involved, but it's still wonderful.However, being shot in 2.35:1 CinemaScope, the presentation does suffer from horrific pan and scan when shown on TV; I've no idea why, given the success of the virtual remake Back To School, this film hasn't been released on a widescreen DVD as it deserves; I suspect some type of conflict with the film or music rights that hopefully will be resolved soon.

This is one of the best Bing Crosby's later films. He only gets to sing two songs in it, The Second Time Around and It Came Upon A Midnight Clear during a Christmas hayride with some of the rest of his younger cast members.Bing is 53 year old Harvey Howard, self made millionaire restaurant franchise owner, who's decided to go back and do a lot of the things he missed when he was younger which included a college education. That in itself is an intriguing character for me. I've met a lot of self made types in my life who think because they are successful and make a lot of money in one field, they're omni-competent. Just the fact that Harvey Howard IS going back to college to improve himself intellectually and broaden his horizons is a plus for me with this character.I read an interview with Fabian once who said that Bing was great to work with and put him right at ease. Fabian had just done one feature film called Hound Dog Man and it was less than a success. After High Time he went on to a pretty good career in films during the sixties.The Second Time Around was the last of 15 songs that Bing introduced in films that was nominated for an Academy Award, a record not likely to be broken. It lost to Never On Sunday. It was a million selling song, but ironically not by Bing. Frank Sinatra took the song and he made it a big hit, probably the only time in Bing's career this ever happened.The kids are just fine, Fabian, Tuesday Weld, Richard Beymer (a year away from West Side Story)Patrick Adiarte. Gavin MacLeod has some very funny moments as Bing's comic nemesis and absent minded chemistry professor and Nicole Maurey strikes the right note as the French teacher that widower Crosby falls for.A really great feel good movie.