Be true to your school

Took the kids to see The Belles at St Trinian's at the Edinburgh Filmhouse the other week. They weren't too impressed. "It's in black and white!" my seven-year-old exclaimed in horror as the 1954 film started.




Frank Launder's film is hardly a classic, but watching it for the first time in years I was surprised to find myself laughing now and again. Alistair Sim (who, as the plaque on the wall of the Edinburgh Filmhouse points out was "born near here") was always an actor worth watching,and in his double role as both headmistress and gambler (and sister and brother), he had the odd good line to flash out. Pointing out that his brother's daughter burnt down the gym Sim the headmistress said "There's been too much arson about". Then there was the schoo motto "In Flagrante Delicto".
Those moments, some familiar faces (Hermione Baddeley, Beryl Reid, Joyce Grenfell)and young starlets flashing their stocking tops playing suspiciously developed schoolgirls meant it was an agreeable time-passer.
Frank Launder and his film-making partner Sidney Gilliat were veterans by this time. And to be honest their best years were behind them by the time they started adapting the Ronald Searle novels.At some point I'll have to take a look at the films they made in the 1940s (it's my contention that I See a Dark Stranger is one of the great overlooked films of British cinema history.
Does it give us any sense of Britain in the 1950s? A little perhaps. A more racey, less deferential place perhaps than reputation might allow (albeit we are talking about a comedy). The fifties remains something of an enigma when all you have to go on is visual representations. British cinema in the fifties was all too keen to look back to the 1940s. And maybe it's only the films of the Boulting Brothers that we can get any real sense of the place. Yet, like America, Britain was going through the convulsions of rock and roll. You can't see it in the Cliff Richard movies of the time but it was there. Artists like Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and of course Richard Hamilton were responding to American influences and the youthquake of the sixties was in the act of being impregnated. Can you see it in the films that were being made in Britain at the time?
Only in the margins. Only in the stocking tops. (TJ)

Keith and kin

The recent death of Keith Waterhouse - after a long and, by all accounts, well oiled life, prompted a couple of quick thoughts.
I've long imagined you can see in the film version of Waterhouse's novel Billy Liar the moment when the interest in the angry young men of the 1950s gives way to the myth of swinging London.
It's not just in the fact that Tom Courtenay's Billy isnt really angry. He's a fantasist who's not willing to pursue his fantasies. In short, he's a Smiths fan avant la lettre.
But more than that, it's in the incarnation of his fantasy - Julie Christie.
Christie plays a girl that does the things Billy just dreams about. She gets on the train to London and goes, while Billy stays.
I've always imagined that she got off the train from Leeds and straight into the heart of the swinging sixties (and onto the set of Darling; a journey also made by director John Schlesinger who directed both movies). I like the idea so much I've never done the cursory research to see if Christie made any movies in between Billy Liar and Darling, safe in the notion that we're talking fictions here anyway and if I'm not right, the idea feels right.

The other Waterhouse notion is that in all the obits I've been reading one of his greatest achievements is overlooked or at the very least only appears near the end in the "he also wrote" section.






Perhaps that's because his TV series Budgie isn't quite as good as I remember it. That's possible. It's been the best part of two decades since I last watched it. And yet I remember it as very good, with nuanced performances from Adam Faith in the title role, Iain Cuthbertson as the Scottish criminal Charlie Endell and in particular Georgina Hale as Budgie's estranged wife, and some sharp writing by Waterhouse and his writing partner Willis Hall.
Am I wrong? (TJ)