Film review: Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (1957)

This should really be called "St. Trinian's Abroad" or something like that, because the main plot is a party from the school traveling through Europe to end up in Rome.  It does begin at the school, where, sadly, Alastair Sim's headmistress is "departed"... to prison for the duration of the film, so we just get shots of him at the beginning and end.  A suitably battle-hardened replacement is en route from Australia where she has been in charge of a borstal, 

but when she arrives she is quickly trussed up and stored in the belfry because they want to use her persona as a cover for one of the "girls'" (the older girls are quite clearly full-grown women, which, given the plot, is just as well) fathers, who is a jewel thief (played by Lionel Jeffries, whom I know mostly from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) who is the subject of a manhunt and needs to escape the country. This is facilitated by the girls "winning" a Unesco academic competition (by blackmailing an Oxford Don who is in hock to the bookies that Flash Harry (George Cole, his role expanded to replace the missing Sim) 

works for to provide the answers, which are then substituted for the actual, no doubt egregious, St. Trinian's attempt in a daring Rififi-esque heist on the Ministry of Education) the prize for which is said cross-Europe trip.  Reprising her role as the hapless policewoman is Joyce Grenfell (unrecognized by the girls, as this is supposed to be years later, but Flash Harry remembers her and is not fooled by her "interpreter" disguise) and newly on board is Terry-Thomas, who runs the only coach company disreputable enough to be prepared to rent to St. Trinians, who falls for Grenfell's copper.  

The real reason the girls want to go to Rome is explained in a pre-amble (that mirrors the one from the first film set in a fictional Middle Eastern country) where we see Flash Harry meeting with a rich eligible Italian bachelor with his "marriage service" where he arranges unions with the older girls in St. Trinian's.  

The Italian demands to meet with the girls in person, hence the need for the trip.  Subplots abound, like the jewel thief hiding his jewels in a water polo ball, and Michael Ripper 

as the Ministry of Education lift operator forced to go along on the trip because he's easiest to threaten, and the Army attempting to keep the girls in check in between headmistresses.  The new stock of girls includes 50's glamor it-girl Sabrina, who has nothing to do but look sultry, pretend to read Dostoyevsky in bed and pretend to be the "school swot," for which she gets near top-billing.  

And this time round the cops include a young Terry (of "and June") Scott.

Again directed by Frank Launder, of the storied Launder & Gilliat team, and of equivalent quality to the first, although Sim is sorely missed.  

Jami particularly liked the scene where a man at the ministry of education falls through the hole under the carpet left after the aforementioned reverse heist.