We've been on a Launder and Gilliat streak (starting with our Lady Vanishes re-watch) and an Alastair Sim streak (there's a lot of overlap) and this is definitely up there with the best of both. According to one of the special features, this was Launder (who directed this, as with the St. Trinian's films)'s attempt to do an Ealing Comedy (it helped that he co-wrote it with John Dighton, whose play it was, but who also wrote Kind Hearts and Man in the White Suit) and it certainly delivers. As Sim plays the harried headmaster of a school of not-great-repute, and as Rutherford shows up with a girl's school, you can see why this is seen as sort of a dry-run for the St. Trianian's films (also, there is a fair amount of cast overlap, including Joyce Grenfell and Richard "ubiquitous" Wattis, and of course George Cole crops up in a tiny uncredited role, a la An Inspector Calls, and to top it off, Ronald Searle drew the opening credits)
but it is, in my opinion, not only quite different, it's considerably better. So, the basic outline: it's the first day of term at Nutbourne College, a minor private boys' school, and we arrive on the train with the new English master (who looks like a knock-off Montgomery Clift) and the jaded Maths master (the aforementioned Wattis, who was born jaded).
They are driven to the (very nice-looking - parts of the building are said to date back to Henry VIII's time) school by the harried general school dogsbody Rainbow and discover that it has been spruced up a bit over the holidays, something that makes Wattis's Billings suspicious. It turns out that Sim's Wetherby Pond is up for a job at a more prestigious school, whose board are coming to look over Nutbourne to see if they think Pond is of the right calibre. But sudden complications arise in the form of 100 more trunks and tuck-boxes than they are expecting arriving, along with news that the Ministry of Education (of which Wattis plays the head in the St. Trinian's films - clearly it Loomed Large for Launder) is billeting another school at Nutbourne. Apparently in the postwar years this kind of thing was not uncommon, what with all the bombings. Pond is momentarily discombobulated, but leads a charge of the masters to prepare to billet the children and (he presumes) masters, and is up in the attic doing this when Margaret Rutherford's Miss Whitchurch and a retinue of female teachers (one of whom is Grenfell's "Sausage" Gossage, an even-more overgrown schoolgirl than her undercover policewoman of the Trinian's films, this time a sports teacher).
Nobody is there to meet them, so they troop inside and are very dismissive of what, to us, looked like the height of luxury (albeit coated in a layer of dust that "Sausage" absent-mindedly writes her name in). They, of course, think that it is a girls' school, which makes them rather shocked by the school motto "Guard Your Honour," not to mention the vaguely smutty books (Casanova's biography) on the bookshelf in the teachers' common room, but are still ignorant of its true nature when they take up possession of Pond's office so that they can use his phone to call the ministry to complain. Meanwhile, Pond is suddenly faced both with his staff leaving in protest at having to cook for 100 more pupils than they were prepared for, and a horde of girls suddenly arriving, the first one of which breaks it to him the true nature of "St. Swithin's". And then he finds Miss Whitchurch on the phone, just finding out that the Ministry is closed for the day.
Then it's a race to see who can commandeer the dorms first - a race that the women win by locking the men in their common room while they're getting the keys to lock the girls out of the dorms. But then the boys show up and find the girls in their rooms...
What I like more about this film than the St. Trinian's series is that the humor is more grounded and is more earned rather than relying on the shock value of the violence of the young girls and the hyper sexuality of the older girls. In this film the children are actually very obedient, the boys get on fine with the girls (except for an initial pillow fight and a climactic brawl on the playing fields) and it's the adults that are the source of the comedy because of their various schemes. Also, just as you're settling in for a prolonged war between Pond and Whitchurch, they form a friendly alliance in the face of (a) the knowledge that the Ministry is far too chaotic to correct the error they've made any time soon, (b) a group of St. Swithin's parents are coming to visit and mustn't see the boys (this is initially resolved by hiding the boys for the day off at the swimming pool but then...) and a shock moving-up of the visit from the board at the school Pond wants to be the next head of to that very day. So the climax of the film is a glorious extended set piece where Whitchurch is guiding a tour of the parents around at the same time as Pond is showing the board of his dream school around, and to make it all work they have to time it so that the girls are in the classrooms when Whitchurch's party arrives, but trade places with the boys for Pond's party. Lots of lovely touches like the children who are advance scouts
using such tools as mirrors to see round corners, or rollerskates to get down the corridor fast, one particular girl being in every class that her increasingly bemused parents enter, Pond and Whitchurch having to think on their feet to explain things away (like Whitchurch explaining the bikini girl pics belonging to the randy games master Hyde Brown
as being the champion swimmers of yore, or Pond explaining away the knickers that the girls' dress-making class left in the desks when replaced by the boys). Will they pull it off? Let's just say the film ends a bit suddenly with the Man from the Ministry arriving with a third school, as Pond and Whitchurch ponder the merits of vanishing off to the colonies. A very breezy and effective farce that I found surprisingly progressive, all things considered. Two thumbs up! (Bonus Trivia: the attractive love interest for the Clift-esque Mr. Farrell, his counterpart English teacher Miss Harper (Bernadette O'Farrell), ended up marrying Frank Launder the same year the film came out. They were married 47 years until his death.)
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