The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950)
Directed by Frank Launder

Film Review

"Now, up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire!"  Margaret Rutherford's stout rallying cry for obedient schoolgirls is just one of the priceless gems offered by this British comedy classic, one of the most fondly remembered films to come out of the partnership of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.  An obvious precursor to Lauder and Gilliat's subsequent St Trinian's films, The Happiest Days of Your Life is a similarly anarchic school-centred farce, based on a play by John Dighton.  The film was a massive hit at the box office when it was first released in the UK in 1950 and it remains one of the enduring comedy classics of British cinema.  Few films of this era are as relentlessly funny as this one and if you are in desperate need of a high-dose pick-me-up this will surely hit the spot.

The film's number one asset is its mouth-watering principal cast, which offers up no fewer than three legends of British comedy: Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford and Joyce Grenfell.  The vitriolic stand off between Sim and Rutherford when they first meet on screen is one of the great moments in British cinema, a titanic clash of personalities that surpasses anything found in The Iliad or The Odyssey, or anywhere else for that matter.  This auspicious first meeting risks turning into a two-person arms race, with the gags and recriminations accumulating faster than a nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. If you ever wondered where Sim's outrageously camp Miss Fritton came from, this film may provide a few clues.

And if the iconic Sim-Rutherford confrontation is not enough to sate your appetite for humorous hijinks, there's additional nourishment from the ever delightful Miss Grenfell, comedy fodder in the most easily digestible form.  As ever, she revels in the part of the gawky spinster, her Miss Gossage ('Call me Sausage!') being a close cousin of the character she would later play in the St Trinian's films.  Comedy stalwart Richard Wattis and RAF-type Guy Middleton lend their support to this delightfully boisterous comedy, along with a seemingly infinite supply of Hellish school boy and girl monstrosities.  Despite all the mayhem going on around them, it is Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford who effortlessly succeed in wrenching the focus in their direction, rewarding us with what is undeniably the cinematic showdown of the century.  "How dare you, sir!" "How dare you madam!"  Sheer bliss.

Film Synopsis

On his return to civilian life after the war, Richard Tassell arrives to take up his new post as English master at Nutbourne College, a small private school for boys.  The school is run by Mr Wetherby Pond and Tassell's colleagues include a narcoleptic French master, a maths teacher who prefers football pools to algebra and a games teacher who would rather prop up the bar at the local hostelry than subject himself to outdoor sport.  Just as the school is about to open for the start of a new term, Pond is notified by the ministry that he should expect a hundred extra pupils, temporarily billeted from St Swithin's School.   Not only does his school not have enough space to accommodate these additional pupils, Pond soon discovers, to his horror, that the extra pupils are all girls!  To make matters worse, the entire kitchen staff choose this inopportune moment to hand in their notice.  Miss Whitchurch, the headmistress of St Swithin's, and Mr Pond get off on the wrong foot but agree to try to make the best of an impossible situation.  When some parents of St Swithin's girls arrive to make a tour of the school, Miss Whitchurch sets her mind to making a good impression.  Unfortunately, this visit coincides with another by a party of governors from a more prestigious school to which Pond has applied for the post of headmaster.  By exercising a little cunning, Miss Whitchurch and Mr Pond contrive to give their visitors the impression that their's is the perfect single-sex school.  The best laid schemes...