Classic Film Review: Crichton, Ealing and Sim begin the glory days of British comedy — “Hue and Cry”

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They’ve got a lady crook — they think — tied up. And two English lads have been given their orders. One, who looks to be about 13, fumbles pulling out his pocket knife to comply.

“You ‘eard what he said. ‘Make ‘er TALK!”

The other – he can’t be more than ten — blanches.

“Couldn’t we just…tickle her?”

The “mystery” is only half-solved, and the real mayhem is yet to come. But with “Hue and Cry,” the very first “Ealing Comedy,” by London’s Ealing Studios, the die was cast from the opening credits, which are hand-painted onto the ruins of just-blitzed London.

Some of the most beloved and timeless comedies in screen history would wear that label, a couple of the very best — “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Titfield Thunderbolt” — by the “Hue and Cry” team of writer T.E.B. Clarke and director Charles Crichton He finished his career directing a modern classic, “A Fish Called Wanda.”

But here’s how it all stared, in postwar “Broke if not Broken Britain” in 1947, with a tale of boys who get the idea that their favorite comic is sending messages, in code, to London’s underworld to arrange this week’s burglary.

It’s a bouncing, energetic farce using real bombed-out buildings and London street scenes, and a sea of little kids teaming up to foil villains. It starts swell, bounces through the middle acts and finishes with a flourish, a classic that, dated-or-not, still delivers laughs almost 75 years after it was made.

Joe Kirby (Harry Fowler) is the teen in tatty tie and vest who uncovers the “code.” He’s too old to admit he loves comics, “what a load’a tripe!” But “The Trump,” set among mobsters, thieves, cutthroats and pathological liars (go figure) has him hooked.

And he can’t help but notice the real street names and addresses that turn up in “The Trump” every week, among other coincidences.

He starts to enlist the other lads — billed “The Blood and Thunder Boys” in the credits — in his “theory.” The police inspector (Jack Lambert) may not want to hear it.

“Look, sonny, I really think you ought to lay off those ‘shockers.'”

Joe won’t hear of it. He even tracks down the taxidermy-crazed fussbudget (Alastair Sim) who writes the comic to prove his theory.

What follows is “The Goonies” of its day, an Anglicized “Hardy Boys” where the boys are legion and include plucky, two-fisted Clarry (Joan Dowling).

Brawls, melees, kids swarming cops and thugs alike like ants defending the colony, bees swarming to save the hive.

The fresh restoration of “Hue and Cry,” with its simple, immaculate construction, artful shadows, vivid depiction of late ’40s London and jaunty, roiling action, is part of a new Alastair Sim boxed set from Film Movement, which takes another Sim film — “School of Laughter” — as its title.

Sim, who would go on to play the most memorable Ebeneezer Scrooge of them all in “A Christmas Carol,” is deliciously owlish here, his eyes bugging out of these deep, dark sockets, the words a florid whirl of plummy posh locutions.

“They’ve purloined my code! What a jape, eh?” “Oh, how I loathe adventurous-minded boys!”

Fowler and some of the of the other kids went on to storied careers. You’d have to be a frame-by-frame obsessive to see the future “Manuel” of John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers,” Andrew Sachs, as one of the kiddie extras.

It plainly took some of its inspiration from America’s “Our Gang/Little Rascals,” but “Hue and Cry” lifts any ruckus previously kids’ action movies ventured to a whole new level.

Fisticuffs, a vigorous shaking that would get your adult co-star prison time in this day and age, and all those “Beasts of the Southern Wild/Wendy” settings, with their busted bricks and exposed rebar.

Never get away with that today. Nor should you try. Here’s a classic that stands alone, a London landmark with laughs that takes us back to a more rough and tumble time, and does it with a style that would be admired and copied for generations to come.

3half-star

Cast: Alastair Sim, Harry Fowler, Joan Dowling, Jack Warner, Stanley Escane, Douglas Barr, Valerie White, Ian Dawson and Jack Lambert.

Credits: Directed by Michael Crichton, script by T.E.B. Clarke. An Ealing Studios/Film Movement release.

Running time:

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Movie Review: Recalling choices, past loves, what might have been “On a Magical Night”

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There’s something ever-so-French about the idea of a fractured couple debating “what might have been” with a former lover. So grown up!

And widening that argument to include every lover the philandering member of the couple has had? Her mother? Grandmother?

Hashing out the past, and bedding, the 25 year-old version of her husband? Interrupted by the French love balladeer Charles Aznavour?

That’s as French as it gets. That could only happen “On a Magical Night.”

Christophe Honoré, who did the romantic musical “Beloved,” rejoins his muse Chiara Mastroianni for this romantic fantasy/sex farce, a tale that is by turns surreal and ultra-real, giddy and wistful, melancholy and just plain goofy.

We meet Maria (Mastroianni) when she unabashedly stumbles out of the closet. Her student/lover (Harrison Arevalo) is billing and cooing with his girlfriend, trying to get her out the door after she interrupted Maria and Asdrubal Electorat in flagrante delicto.

She’s naked, dressing and babbling on about how inane the two of them are as a couple (to their faces), that she should know better than “dating my students.” But hey — she teaches law, and his name is ELECTORAT. How could she not jump at that chance?

50ish Maria ogles younger men all the way though Paris on her walk home. She takes a cover-my-tracks shower and drones on about her day, the law, blah blah blah. But husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay), who misses the first clues, finally opens her beeping phone and finds the incriminating texts.

He isn’t so much put-out as deflated, and her “It’s nothing to get excited about” and “We’ve been like siblings (not husband and wife) for YEARS” dismissals doesn’t help.

As he holes up in another room with just a “We need to think it over” (in French with English subtitles), she decides “I want to be alone.”

She throws a few things in a bag, slips out and checks into a hotel — right across the street from their flat. It’s in “Room 212” (the title of this when it came out in France) that the weirdness goes down.

Spying on Richard through the window, she wonders what went wrong. And that’s when 25 year-old Richard (Vincent Lacoste) drops in and the REAL debate begins.

He is, she declares, “My perfect husband.” How many years have we been married, then? “Over 20.” “Twenty-five” is the correct answer. And if he was “perfect,” why’d she cheat? And how often?

Doors open and “Room 212” expands into some “Inception” nightmare, as Maria drops a name or two — her side-pieces. And then her mother shows up and drops dozens more.

The guys — all young — start dropping in. Or checking out.

There’s time to have sex with the younger version of Richard, and plenty of time to consider how life might have been better for him had he stayed with his first love and turned down Maria’s proposal, way back when.

He used to go on about “Irène.” Ok, let’s get HER into “Room 212.” And hell’s bells, she turns out to have been young YOUNG Richard’s piano teacher (Camille Cottin), the one who “made him the man he is” — cultured and bookish and musical — only to lose him to Maria.

While both women indulge in a taste for younger man-skin, Irène crossed lines that only a French comedy would deem nothing to raise an eyebrow about. She taught the boy piano and romance in her home, starting when he was 14, taking his lessons half naked at the keyboard.

Irène would love to have Richard back, and would REALLY love to have had the lives she thought they’d have together — children included. Maria isn’t into kids.

A child turns up when Irène crosses the street and tries to restart her affair (as she was then) with now-50ish Richard.

And then Maria’s “Will” shows up, “the one that guides you.” That would be the beloved crooner Aznavour, dapperly played here in a leopard-skin smoking jacket by Stéphane Roger.

“I am not Pinocchio’s cricket,” he waffles. But “He’s your husband, and you prefer him at 25, not 50.”

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Syruppy ballads, often in English, waft up on the soundtrack as Richard philosophizes “Love is always but a memory” to Irène and Maria tries to rationalize her way out of her faithlessness. The film takes its title from a Barry Manilow tune that makes an appearance here.

“Wounds” and “blows” are remembered and weighed, a wise observation of how we break down our breakups in our mind. Set this on a snowy winter’s night to fortify that mood.

And then deal with the chaos of having every lover (at the age they were then) confront you over why you didn’t say you were married, why you keep bedding students and why you forgot this one or that one who complains “I tend to get lost in threesomes.”

A toddler is picked up and becomes an obvious plastic doll, doors slam and Aznavour tries to facilitate without judging (not really).

It sounds giddier than it is, but there’s a lot of fun mixed in with the somber assessments of a failed relationship. In the end, it’s too much to juggle or do justice to, and “On a Magical Night” is never quite “could this be the magic at last.”

Then again, maybe you have to be a certain age to get what Honoré’s message is and appreciate the little profundities mixed with the sight gags and jokes. Maybe I am.

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MPAA Rating: unrated, a moment of violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Benjamin Biolay, Camille Cottin , Vincent Lacoste, Harrison Arevalo, Stéphane Roger and Carole Bouquet

Credits: Written and directed by Christophe Honoré. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:26

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Will “Tenet” be the film that reopens cinemas?

Director Christopher Nolan wants his latest sure-to-be-a-blockbuster “Tenet” to be the film that heralds the etun of movie theaters. Warner Bros. has to make a decision in roughly a week about whether to hold its July 17 release date or push it back into later in the year. https://t.co/kRZherRgNC

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Preview: I guess we need to check out “Trial by Media” on Netflix

Looks rather lopsided. But in a couple of days, May 11, I guess we’ll find out if this series, by several less known filmmakers and released by the “Tiger King” network, is completely full of it.

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Preview: “HIGHTOWN” coming to Starz

A murder mystery in the drug world of…Cape Cod?

Monica Raymond and a lot of beautiful actresses (Hey, Starz, amIright?) and James Badge Dale star in this moody, geographically fascinating series. May 17 on Starz.

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Movie Preview: Finding Mr. Wrong, losing your “Babyteeth”

Ben Mendelsohn is the disapproving Dad in this dramedy about life, death and finding love when you’re very very sick.

June 19.

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Bingeworthy? “Lambs of God” surprises, startles and jolts — start to finish

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If only all limited series were as strange, surprising, literary and darkly delightful as “Lambs of God.” This Aussie-made tale of nuns, an intruder priest, crimes and history, ghosts and miracles is equal parts “The Beguiled” and “Agnes of God.”‘

And the entire enterprise, based on Marele Day’s novel, is passing strange, Gothic magical realism stirred to life by a top flight cast in the starkest of settings.

All my gripes about current trends in the genre, that these series start too slowly and dribble out the plot points and jolts to maximize the Time Spent Watching, are tossed aside in four brisk, grim, darkly-funny and even moving episodes now streaming on Topic.com.

Essie Davies of “The Babadook,” Jessica Barden of “Scarborough” and “Penny Dreadful,” and the great Ann Dowd (“Handmaid’s Tale,” “American Animals”) are three surviving Sisters of St. Agnes, nuns cloistered on an island off the British coast.

Their version of Catholicism is barely recognizable. They pray to their “Heavenly Mother.” Their rituals to “My queen, My mother” adhere to a calendar that includes “hair day” (a trimming), “sheering day” for the sheep, and when Sister Iphegenia (Davies) has a vision, “killing day.” That’s when Sister Margarita (Dowd) sings to a lamb they will kill for food and as a sacrifice.

They drink the dying lamb’s blood, as well.

They watch for newborn lambs that they decide are the reincarnation of this or that Sister who left this world. Novitiate Carla (Barden) is the most enthusiastic about this tradition.

It’s pretty clear that their disconnect from the world is years and years long, that they’ve drifted back towards paganism. The semi-ruined convent, accessible only at low tide, is primitive and ancient and we have plenty of time to wonder if this is some thread of Medieval Catholic history we’ve forgotten, or if these three have survived an Apocalypse.

That’s when the first jolt arrives. A man, dressed in black, curses his way through the brambles up from the beach. He is a priest, Father Ignatious (Sam Reid of “Belle” and ”
The Astronaut Wives Club”). He’s a little put out being here, and a lot put-out finding them here.

“Don’t TELL me you don’t have electricity,” he gripes, opening his flip phone. It’s 1999, and the Bishop’s secretary has shown up to look over a long-forgotten church property.

The series is about what the church wants with this place, what Father Ignatius tells them and hides from them, and what sort of drastic actions they take to preserve their “heretical” way of life.

It’s a “haunted island,” where visions of long-dead nuns appear to the Sisters. Will the rude and imperious Father Ignatius see them, mollify them and bring the trio into the (still) 20th century?

There are intrigues at the Mother Church, where the Bishop (John Bell) complains that they can ill afford “ANOTHER scandal.”

And there’s a man hunt, or priest hunt. Ignatius has a semi-estranged sister (Kate Mulvaney of “Hunters”) in AA, who wonders where her brother has got off to. Tracking the anal retentive sibling to his departure point, cussing out the lazy constable (Daniel Henshall) who is slow-off-the-mark on the missing-persons beat, may get us somewhere.

Or not.

The arrogant, aloof Ignatius isn’t just missing. He’s in peril. And his efforts to divide and conquer the trio to affect his escape may not be taken well.

As Ignatius suffers and the sisters have their visions, see ghosts and experience flashbacks telling us how they got there, “Lambs of God” grabs us by the tenterhooks, making us puzzle out what might come next.

The acting is stellar across the board, but Barden is the standout here. Carla is utterly naive to the ways of the world, gobsmacked that Father Ignatius smokes (“Dragon,” Sister Margarita cautions.) and can blow rings, that he has a gadget that makes music (1990s ringtones) and channels voices.

She sees her first male genitalia when Ignatius passes out from their “Stay at Home” herbal tea. A Biblical reference is all Carla can summon up for the sight.

“Baby Moses in the rushes!”

Dowd’s Margarita is the truest of the true believers, and the most menacing.

“I can SMELL your deceit, Ignatius!”

There’s violence and intrigue, sex, sacrilege and singing in Latin in this tight and tense melodramatic thriller. The New South Wales settings nicely substitute for the Cornish coast, the supernatural touches often have down-to-Earth origins.

And the surprises never cease, making this that rare “limited run” mini-series that delivers big moments in every episode, keeps us guessing and keeps us watching without the teasing and padding-out too many streaming shows go for these days.

3half-star

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, sex and profanity

Cast: Essie Davies, Jessica Barden, Sam Reid Kate Mulvany and Ann Dowd.

Credits: Created and scripted by Sarah Lambert, based on the novel by Marele Day. A Topic.com release.

Running time: Four episodes @54 minutes each.

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Netflixable? French thriller shows that to “Get In,” you’ve got to get past the squatters

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“Get In” is a taut, troubling and topical French thriller almost utterly undone by its over-the-top finale.

In movie buff shorthand, it’s a John Schlesinger’s “Pacific Heights” that devolves into Sam Peckpinpah’s “Straw Dogs” — devolves, and keeps on devolving.

Aurélien Molas and Olivier Abbou’s script gets into issues of masculinity, race, bullying and a justice system that fails to deliver justice.

At every turn, history teacher Paul, played by Adama Niane (“Gang of the Caribbean”) is pushed, misused and tested. It started before the movie begins. His marriage to Chloé (Stéphane Caillard of TV’s “War of the Worlds”) is in trouble. And then, after a nice long road trip vacation in his father’s old RV, they’re denied entrance to their home.

As outrages go, that’s primal. Not only has the recently-evicted couple — Sabrina (Marie Bourin) was their nanny — changed the locks and denied them entry after house-sitting for them. They call the cops and Paul is roughed up and taken in when he is understandably outraged at how his kindness has been repaid.

This “true story” takes the family into the French legal system, with judges kicking the decision hither and yon — that’s what covering your bases and having a “contract” with the house sitter gets you — days becoming weeks and then months.

Their lawyer is all reassurances, “They have no right to be there” and “You’ll get your house back, I assure you.” And yet, “You can’t evict them” and “The council bans evictions in the winter.” As they’ve been warned by the cops, “Don’t try to do this by yourselves — three years in prison” well, what are they to do?

Paul, given to storming out of meetings or, in the case of the marriage counselor, skipping them altogether, is increasingly outraged.

We think, “How far can he be pushed?” But we, like his wife, like Sabrina’s hulking husband Eric (Hubert Delattre) size up the thin Franco-African and say, “What’re you gonna do about it?” (in French, with English subtitles).

The RV park where they have to stay might have the answer. Mickey (Paul Hamy) is a rough character. But we can see the look he and Chloé share, even if Paul doesn’t notice.

They have history. And judging from his tattoos, and hers, it was rough and ready. Mickey is bad news all around as he talks Paul into “guys’ night out,” drinking strip club binges topped off with a little redneck animal cruelty.

Yeah, totally a thing in France, too.

Mickey taunts Paul — “You’re a victim because you decided to be one.”

Chloé shrugs with a “You don’t get it. We can’t do anything. So accept it.”

Will he be goaded into action by Mickey, or tamed into putting the marriage and their family first and hoping for the best from a court system that doesn’t guarantee that?

Director Abbou and his cast make us furious on Paul’s behalf, then fearful of Paul’s actions. The conversations with the squatters are all “No comment, no comment…You need to LEAVE.”

Paul ends far too many talks with legal figures with the phrase “You can’t be serious!”

Paul’s attempts at resisting this incessant bullying — even his bigger students in class figure they can push him around — make us feel his futility.

As this isn’t America, Paul can’t drive straight to a gun store to even up the odds. Just having this thought it part of the film’s troubling way of playing with the psyche.

“Get In,” titled “Furie” when it was released in Europe, works on you and works on you and builds towards something that the finale suggests is the true consequence of crossing that line into violence.

You can’t control it. Once unleashed, it consumes you, your enemies and those you love.

Not a bad parable for our times, with “might makes right” and “superior firepower” increasingly the rule as first justice and fairness break down, then civility, then law and order.

But the Big Finish here looks like something horror studio Blumhouse would cook up. “Get In” doesn’t get quite all the way in because of it.

stars2

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, explicit sex, nudity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Adama Niane, Stéphane Caillard, Paul Hamy, Marie Bourin and Hubert Delattre

Credits: Directed by Olivier Abbou, script by Aurélien Molas and Olivier Abbou. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

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Movie Review: “Cry Havoc,” and let this dog slip into VOD while no one was watching

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Ever wondered how legendary screen tough-guy Charles Bronson would handle himself in a torture porn film?

Me either. But wonder no more.

Writer, director, cinematographer and editor Rene Perez cast a Bronson look-alike in “Cry Havoc.” He dyed Robert Bronzi’s hair Bronson-black, gave him a Bronson Fu Manchu mustache. He dressed Bronzi in Bronson black leather, with early ’70s bell bottom pants, no less.

He puts Bronzi in a ’66 Chevy Nova, a very Bronsonesque (undersized) muscle car.

And he turns this guy loose on the mountain west compound of a villain called “The Voyeur,” who “casts” ambitious young females to be in his non-existent “Terror Mountain” reality show.

It’s as terrible as it sounds, largely because it’s pretty obvious that Bronzi was looped so that he’d sound more like…Charles Bronson.

“Seen this girl?”

Classic Bronson one-liner.

The Voyeur (Richard Tyson, wisely bearded, as he wouldn’t want anybody to recognize him in this abortion) captures his “contestants'” slaughter on his many CCTV cameras.

“Pain is the only real truth in this world,” he growls to an empty room. But not for long. An ambitious blonde Iowa TV reporter (Emily Sweet) has agreed to his conditions for an interview — no revealing where he is, and oh, wear this white ball gown to the interview.

Miss Weaver is the last one to figure out she’s merely the latest contestant.

There’s this monster on the mountain, a hulk in a wired-together skin-mask of the Michael Meyers variety, skull and mask covered in more fencing wire. “Havoc” lumbers about with saw blades, shears and axes, hacking up and disemboweling women.

“It” The Voyeur says, “is a force of nature. It simply…was. Like a storm.”

They met in prison, and well, the rich murder freak just HAD to have this “It” he names “Havoc” (Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony’s “let slip the dogs of war” speech) for his little “experiment.”

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Bronzi-Bronson plays a cop hunting for that one particular “girl” who’s disappeared on that mountainside. He doesn’t care how many NRA minions of The Voyeur he has to go through to find her.

It’s a movie of waking up, screaming bloody murder, trying to slip the locks or knots, and generally failing. But even if you/they DO escape, it’s only temporary. Wanton slaughter ensues.

Pointless and ugly is the blurb review of this one.

But Perez does set up a thought experiment of his own with this enterprise. What is it that makes an action movie star, that separates John Cena from Brian Bosworth, Terry Crews from Shaquille O’Neal?

Bronzi summons up the right nostalgia, and the primitive staging and non-“acting” give “Cry Havoc” the feel of a Bronson B-movie of the late ’70s.

It’s all manufactured, even if he did his own re-recording of his voice on set (I can’t tell that, only that he was looped later). But stumbling through a forest shooting people in a squinty-eyed daze does not make you Charles Bronson. The charisma and talent it took to make bad movies watchable just isn’t there.

1star6

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Robert Bronzi, Emily Sweet, J.D. Angstadt and Richard Tyson.

Credits: Written and directed by Rene Perez. A Midnight release,

Running time: 1:25

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Classic Film Review: A horse and hellions — “The Belles of St. Trinian’s”

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The novelty of “The Belles of St. Trinian’s” might be the sight of Alastair Sim in a dress.

The cinema’s defining Ebeneezer Scrooge and a mainstay of postwar British comedies and dramas — he had the title role in the original “An Inspector Calls,” and Hitchcock hired him for “Stagefright” — he took on two roles, as siblings, in this 1954 farce.

But the life of the party here would be the inmates in this asylum, the brash, bedlam-inducing hellions of St. Trinian’s School for Young Ladies. They gamble, cheat, manufacture “bathtub gin,” cross and double-cross one another and leave mayhem in their wake. They’re the reason this comedy is so beloved it has warranted revivals and remakes in the UK over the decades.

It seems the stiff upper lip Brits couldn’t get enough of teen girls behaving badly in a “Stalag 17” styled school comedy.

The plot — a sultan (Eric Pohlmann) needs a place to park his youngest daughter, seeing as how he’s had to “allow the Americans to build their airbase” in his kingdom. Memories of GI mischief during WWII had not been forgotten by the British screenwriters.

St. Trinian’s is recommended, conveniently located near the stables where the sultan’s racehorses are boarded.

Little Fatima may not know what she’s in for, but the residents of town (Stanstead Abbotts, Hertfordshire) sound the fire alarm, board up their store fronts and flee when the train approaches to deliver the students for the fall term.

The local constable locks himself in his cell.

When the girls pelt out of the passenger cars, we see why. They’re unruly, uncontrollable and unstoppable. Miss Millicent (Sim) and her staff (Hermione Baddeley, Balbina, Joan Sims, Renee Houston and Betty Ann Davies among them) barely even try.

The school’s broke and in disrepair, but having a sultan’s daughter could get the staff and local vendors paid, if they play her “pocket money” right.

Millicent’s gambler-brother Clarence (Alastair Sim again) has his own designs. He’s re-enrolled his brassy, streetwise daughter (Vivienne Martin) so that she can befriend young Fatima (Lorna Henderson) and get the skinny on her daddy’s star stallion, Arab Boy, for the upcoming Gold Cup “hunting” (steeplechase) race.

With all the crime and graft and general misbehavior that has nothing to do with education going on, the police send a policewoman (Joyce Grenfell) undercover, taking a job as “sports” mistress, to catch all these miscreants in the act. Or acts.

Hey, when the school motto is “In flagrante delicto,” what would you expect?

The kids set booby traps and pull pranks.They run all manner of scams via their “go between,” the trenchcoated hustler Flash Harry (George Cole, hilarious) who was hired as a teen gardener’s assistant but “disappeared” into a life in in the hedges in 1940. Harry places bets, bottles and sells their chemistry class “bathtub gin” and is fixer for whatever schemes they cook up.

The field hockey team never loses at home, and not just because they play rough, disable the referee and jeer the opposing team without pity. The girls make their home end goal “two feet smaller” than their opponents. Try scoring in that.

There are cliques and factions, which become clearer when Clarence and his daughter Arabella conspire to get Arab Boy out of the Gold Cup, by hook or by crook.

That’s Arabella’s idea, by the way.

Other girls have money on Arab Boy to win. So it’s game on, with the hapless adults mostly bystanders in the shenanigans to come.

The film’s Cockney touches and the screeching underclass accents of the young ladies (one of the jokes) may move you to turn the closed captioning on.

You don’t want to miss throwaway lines like “Listen, rabble,” and “put the screws on the old custard” and hear the undercover policewoman described as a “copper’s kick, in skirts.”

It’s not “holly jolly pulse-throbbing” for the first hour, as the set-up is set up and we’re treated to single scene sight gags, like the booze and smoke filled teacher’s lounge (they don’t bother hiding this from the young “ladies”), the school inspectors who came and were corrupted and kept as a veritable harem of the French teacher (Balbina) and her salon.

It was a daring movie for its day, almost racy for its 1954 depiction of “young ladies” doing what needed to be done in still-“Broke Britannia.”

Director Frank Launder was better known as a screenwriter (Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes”), but he put the very first “Blue Lagoon” on the screen in the 1940s, and made a cottage industry out of “St. Trinian’s” comedies as a director.

The third act here is why “The Belles of St. Trinian’s” is held in such regard, to this day. It’s a near riot of action, climaxing with a restaging of the “Zulu Wars” in the crowded halls of a tumbledown manor house turned boarding school for girls.

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MPAA Rating: “Approved”

Cast: Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Vivienne Martin, Hermione Baddeley and Eric Pohlmann

Credits: Directed by Frank Launder, script by Sidney Gilliat, Val Valentine and Frank Launder. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:31

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