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Tall Story is a 1960 American romance film made by Warner Bros., directed by Joshua Logan, and starring Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda in her film debut. It is based on the 1957 novel The Homecoming Game by Howard Nemerov, which was the basis of a successful 1959 Broadway play titled Tall Story, by the writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The film was a considerable departure from Logan's previous two projects, the drama Sayonara, which won multiple Academy Awards, and the blockbuster South Pacific. It was Robert Redford's first film — he played a basketball player in an uncredited role (Redford had previously appeared as a replacement in the Broadway play in 1959).
The film is a Farce social satire of American campus life, making fun of the way college life can become a marriage market for some students. Fonda portrays a character who is the complete opposite of the independent liberated woman she later personified.
Blent is secretly propositioned, via a radio message, by a gambling syndicate to lose a key game with a visiting Russian team. He refuses to do this, but is unable to return the () cash as he does not know who is behind the bribe. Rather than deliberately throw the game, he decides to deliberately fail an ethics exam, which automatically disqualifies him from playing. He is the best student in class, and the only way he can fail is by copying Ryder's paper. He realizes too late that his not playing is tantamount to ensuring his team will lose and that he has given the gamblers exactly what they want.
Meanwhile, his ethics professor, Leo Sullivan, is coming under extreme student and faculty pressure to reverse the failure and give Blent a passing grade. He refuses to do this on principle, but finally consents to give Blent an oral retest while the game is in progress. Blent passes and plays for the last few minutes, achieving a one-point victory for the school.
Fonda had hated the Broadway play, but was pleased that her part in the film script had been expanded. Logan was a good friend of her father Henry Fonda and saw Jane as a potential major star. He wanted to guide her through her first film experience – she had been modelling for several years – but Fonda found it a "Kafkaesque nightmare," explaining in her autobiography My Life So Far that during the making of Tall Story she suffered from bulimia, sleepwalking and irrational fears that she was "boring, untalented and plain." In 2019, Fonda stated both she and Logan were in love with lead actor Anthony Perkins at the time of filming, causing tension during an already difficult shoot.
A wire-service story shared Fonda's perspective about her good fortune: “Jane frankly admits how she got the role. The producer-director is Josh Logan, her godfather. ‘Of course I’m very grateful to Mr. Logan’ she said as she was getting her hair styled at Warner's. ‘Because of my name, I’m getting the kind of role it would ordinarily take years to earn’.”Thomas, Bob. "Henry Fonda’s Daughter Jane Gets Start in Films.” Yonkers Herald-Statesmen, 31 July 1959, 8.
Campus scenes were filmed at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles.
The Washington Star was displeased: “The title of the picture...is ‘Tall Story,’ but there are a great many more apt adjectives, one of which is ‘dull’ and another ‘trivial’...the funny thing about it is that so many talented humans can manage to look inept at one time and all one place. Among those are director Logan, players Anthony Perkins, Henry Fonda's daughter Jane, and Ray Walston, and the original authors Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.” Carmody, Jay. “Jane, Newest Fonda, Needs Better Script.” Washington Star, 30 April 1960, A-13.
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