Fraternity Row on AllMovie

This alternately hard-edged and bittersweet drama looks at life on a college campus in the early '50s. Zac Sterling (Gregory Harrison) is a student eager to be accepted at one of the school's fraternities, where the pledges are put through the ritual of "hazing" by sensible Rodger Carter (Peter Fox) and loutish Chuck Cherry (Scott Newman). While Zac's intellectual girlfriend Jennifer Harris (Nancy Morgan) regards the Greek system as discriminatory and elitist, he's eager to belong; but he decides, along with several other pledges, to rebel against the tortures inflicted by the upperclassmen upon the new members of the frat. However, the more the pledges rebel against hazing, the more punishment Chuck inflicts upon them, until finally a prank goes too far and one of the new fraternity brothers winds up dead. Director Thomas J. Tobin was able to bring this polished-looking film in on a remarkably low budget by employing a cast and crew recruited from the graduate film program at the University of Southern California. Scott Newman, who played Chuck, was the son of actor Paul Newman; sadly, he died of a drug overdose within a year of this film's release.