St. Trinians - The Pure Hell Of St. Trinians [DVD] [1960]

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St Trinian's is depicted as an unorthodox girls' school where the younger girls wreak havoc and the older girls express their femininity overtly, turning their shapeless schoolgirl dress into something sexy and risqué by the standards of the times. St Trinian's is often invoked in discussions about groups of schoolgirls running amok. [ citation needed] Goodwin, Stephen (October 22, 1998). "Revealed: belles of the real St Trinians". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2022-05-24 . Retrieved April 23, 2017. Thumim, Janet. "The popular cash and culture in the postwar British cinema industry". Screen. Vol.32, no.3. p.259. The film plays on the irony of the stuffy, bowler hatted civil servants singing the Red Flag, while their humble cleaner shows her disgust at their cheering. She says they should be impartial, but she also shows sympathy for the outgoing Conservative Prime Minister, so maybe she's actually a secret Tory voter.

Malcolm Arnold's comic sensibilities serve him particularly well in The Belles of St. Trinian's.His main theme is a rambunctious version of the school song, raggedly played as if it's being bashed out by the school orchestra. Flash Harry also gets his own theme, a high speed comical march, to complement his shifty shuffle.

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These kind of escapades seem more like the sort of thing that children in the audience might have envied or aspired to in 1966; running around, riding bikes, driving steam trains, biffing baddies on the head and thwarting a gang of crooks. It's all harmless high jinx, more like Mallory Towers than St. Trinian's, even if some of the girls just wanted the money for themselves. Frankie Howerd plays the lead crook, Alfred Askett, whose front operation is as a fancy male hairdresser, "Alphonse of Monte Carlo". Howerd's character has a little fake quiff that he removes when the customers have gone, which must be some sort of in-joke, as it means that the famously badly wigged Howerd is wearing another wig on top of his actual one. The plot of The Belles of St. Trinian's is a slightly convoluted effort, involving a Sultan(Eric Pohlmann), who chooses the school for his young daughter Fatima (Lorna Henderson), because it's close to the stables where he keeps his racehorses. Malcolm Arnold's score also adds to the film's air of jollity, and is entertaining and inventive enough to make you regret his move into war films and dramas later in the decade, where he tended to recycle the same themes. Arnold's skills were better displayed in his earlier films, including David Lean's The Sound Barrier(1952) and Hobson's Choice(1954).

In the 1950s they began to specialise in making comedy films, and these were the boom years for British film comedy. The Belles of St. Trinian's was produced by Launder and Gilliat, directed by Launder and co-written by both, together with a regular collaborator screenwriter Val Valentine. This creative team would remain in place for the next two films in the series. The film was the third most popular movie at the British box office in 1954, after Doctor in the House and Trouble in Store. [12] [13] Critical reception [ edit ] This anarchic portrayal of school life inevitably made the films tremendously popular with British schoolchildren in the 1950s, as a fantasy version of the kind of school where the pupils are really the ones in charge, something that children in the stricter post-war years could only dream about. There's just something utterly magical about the first three St. Trinian's films. Almost every character in them is played by an actor recognisable from over fifty other British films of the time, and they frequently have the best cast lists of comic talent ever seen in a British comedy. Quite often a film with a cast this distinguished can turn out to be a grave disappointment (such a fate befell efforts like "The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins", in which most of the effort on the part of the film-makers seemed to have been in actually recruiting the actors, rather than giving them anything worthwhile to perform). However, "Pure Hell", like "Belles" and "Blue Murder" before it, has a script and a story good enough to support the weight of these amassed comedy greats, most of whom you'll probably never have heard of. They're usually actors who appeared in loads of films of the period, and you'd never have thought of making a film at the time without them, but who never became stars in their own right - chaps like Raymond Huntley and Nicholas Phipps (most memorable in "Doctor in Love" as the frankly spiffing Dr. Cardew). Those actors who, if you're a vintage comedy connoisseur like me, you'll see and then go "Ahhh, yes!"

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The concept was very clever and although I still enjoyed it, I would have liked to have seen more jokes and perhaps, as with the last film, another 15-20 minutes to help the pace and give room for extra pranks and plots. The action gets more frantic and less amusing as it goes along and, by the end of the whole thing, I'd pretty much lost interest in it. The cast are reasonably good. The girls are in two camps – the young thugs and the sexy `girls' (albeit it they are happily in their 20's). The support cast includes good performances from George Cole (complete with cheeky chappy music in case you didn't get it). Parker and Grenfell are OK but their stuff on the island doesn't really wash. Barker and Walters are fine, as is a cameo from Le Mesurier, but Sid James is pretty wasted. All becomes clear when Sir Horace pays a personal visit to his lover, Amber Spottiswood (Dora Bryan), who just happens to be the headmistress of St. Trinian's. With her new windfall, Amber is able to get the school up and running again in new premises. She also sets about rounding up "the best of the mistresses"from her staff.

Ronald Searle appeared in a cameo role as a visiting parent. [2] Roger Delgado plays the Sultan's aide. [4] It was also the first film appearance of Barbara Windsor, then a teenager. [5] Production [ edit ] The Belles of St. Trinian's, Blue Murder at St. Trinian'sand The Pure Hell of St. Trinian'sall have similar themes, interests and styles, as well as using a shared set of actors and characters, and sometimes even the same jokes. Sim succeeds admirably in making Miss Fritton a plausible character, albeit a comic one, without resorting to cheap laughs or mugging as a man in a dress. Being much too good an actor to descend to the level of a simple drag act, he is careful to allow Miss Fritton her dignity as a character in her own right. Inevitably, the sight of an actor as obviously masculine and as lugubrious as Alastair Sim playing a woman means that the part has a slight element of the grotesque about it, but Sim himself never plays to that.The comic high-points come early in the movie, with Raymond Huntley stealing the movie as a Judge distracted by the charms of a leggy Sixth-Former, while later the 'striptease' Hamlet provides the film's most memorable moment. Irene Handle is also on top form as a more than slightly batty teacher. It has some hilarious moments - particularly the opening trial sequence and the striptease to the soliloquy from "Hamlet" - but it's on the same level as the first two films. As I said yesterday, Alastair Sim's virtual absence from "Blue Murder at St. Trinian's" was a blow to the film while his complete absence from this one is a major blow to it. Considering the importance of Miss Fritton to the first film and the fact that the school burns down, it's bizarre that she isn't even mentioned.

Thanks to the magic of special effects, Sim is able to play two roles, share scenes and take part in conversations with himself. This is a simple concept, but one that was more difficult to achieve in 1954 than in the era of computer effects. But it's one of the most pleasing uses of special effects, expanding the star's acting performance and showing us something that would be impossible in real life. Sim successfully differentiates his two characters in The Belles of St. Trinian's, although it's not that hard when one is wearing a dress, and the shady Clarence is simply the warm up act for his star turn as Miss Fritton. Alfred's daughters are played by Maureen Crombie, as the older Marcia, and Susan Jones as her grubby little sister Lavinia. A little unfairly, Susan Jones isn't even credited on the film, despite having a decent part. Sources online give Maureen Crombie's date of birth as 1943 or 1944, meaning that she was over 20 at the time this was made, and apparently married to her first husband, which is hard to believe as she makes quite a believable younger teenager. The Belles of St. Trinian's borrows several of the stars and supporting players from The Happiest Days of Your Life, including Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, Richard Wattis, George Cole and Guy Middleton. While the St. Trinian's film is broader and not as well plotted as The Happiest Days of Your Life, it does benefit greatly from recycling that film's cast of character actors.The St. Trinian's girls themselves seem quite well behaved this time, especially by that school's standards, making this one more of an agreeable family adventure for the most part. The girls' main role in the film is to catch the crooks in their attempt to get away with the stolen loot. Even the younger terrors of the fourth form are useful here, with one enabling them to give chase by driving a steam engine, having learned from her engine driver father. St. Trinian's is partly a parody and a subversion of the "school stories" genre of the 1950s, popularised by Enid Blyton. But it's also in part a satire of progressive, pupil-centred educational methods, as well as of the supposed value of a private education. New private schools would occasionally spring up in Britain, with the aim of rejecting a traditional curriculum and allowing pupils to follow their own inclinations and interests instead.