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

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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. 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. If it's not as fun as `Belles' or `Blue Murder', `Pure Hell' does have its good points. Cecil Parker's down-at-heel headmaster is a major asset to the movie, while it's nice to see the likes of Sid James, Denis Price and Liz Frazer make an appearance. In the case of St. Trinian's, those interests include crime, cheating, gambling and making illicit booze. St. Trinian's then is depicted initially in the films as a sort of progressive school gone to seed. As Miss Fritton says in the film, St. Trinians is "Perhaps just a teeny-weeny bit unorthodox, but then that's better than being old-fashioned, isn't it?"

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 ] Production company London Film Productions, in association with British Lion Films Distributor British Lion (UK)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. Joyce Grenfell and George Cole were joined by Terry-Thomas for the first St. Trinian's sequel, Blue Murder at St. Trinian's in 1957, with Sim returning in a cameo appearance. Grenfell and Cole returned for the second sequel, The Pure Hell of St. Trinian's in 1960, alongside Cecil Parker. Launder does a near-perfect job of bringing the girls onto the silver screen. The film's tempo keeps to a fast trot and sometimes breaks into a gallop. His comedic timing is excellent. When the Civil Servants dance, he keeps his distance and films them in full, adding to the funniness of the sketch. But if somebody is whispering, he goes for a close-up, and you feel like you're sharing the joke - once again adding power to the humour. The only local businesses that seem to benefit from the presence of the school are the bookmakers and the pawnbrokers. The latter is where the school trophies inevitably end up, whenever Miss Fritton is in need of funds. Which she usually is, as a school as unorthodox as St. Trinian's is constantly short of cash.

The school has no fixed motto but has had several suggested ones. The school's motto is depicted in the original movies from the 1950s and 1960s as In flagrante delicto ("Caught in the Act"). This can be seen on the trophy shelf, above the stairs in The Belles of St Trinian's (1954). The lyrics of the original theme song by Sidney Gilliat (c. 1954) imply that the school's motto is "Get your blow in first" [11] ( Semper debeatis percutis ictu primo). 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. Prominent among the older girls is Georgina, played by James Mason's daughter Portland Mason, in her penultimate film before she retired from acting. Portland, apparently named after Portland Hoffa and not the city in Oregon, was about 17 at the time the film was made. 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.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. It's not entirely clear if the characterisation of the new Schools Minister as corrupt is anti-Labour or simply anti-politicians. It's probably the latter, especially as Launder and Gilliat were originally considered to be quite left wing and were even considering making a Karl Marx biopic at one point. Perhaps that changed, because the next film in this series, The Wildcats of St. Trinian's, would definitely show an anti-trade union stance, and therefore a touch of Thatcherism. In 1990, Chris Claremont and Ron Wagner paid tribute to both Searle and St Trinian's in a story arc in the Marvel comic book Excalibur, in which Kitty Pryde became a student at "St Searle's School for Young Ladies". [15] Towards the end of the arc, Commandere Dai Thomas exclaims, "I took a look at the Special Branch records. Have you any notion what this school's done in the past? With them about, who needs the perishing SAS?" [16] 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. There were some great actors involved and they all do well with the script. I might have come up with an alternative to the "Dance" idea, but actually it did grow on me.