Cinema
Lights, camera, public schools
Britain’s private schools have been involved with the film industry for almost a century, providing a wealth of subjects, locations and actors. Robin Muir traces the history of the (occasionally strained) relationship between producers and headmasters
D
ID you register that statistic reported recently? If you live in a town or city, at any given moment the gap between you and
a brown rat has now shrunk to roughly 50ft. Less widely reported (and arguably less dispiriting) was another: at any given moment, no one, anywhere, is probably more than 50ft away from an Old Etonian actor. There’s Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston,
Nyasha Hatendi, Sebastian Armesto, Simon Woods, Henry Faber, Harry Hadden-Paton, Harry Lloyd and Sam Hoare—and that’s just the new wave. Damian Lewis, Dominic West and Hugh Laurie have already con- quered America. All credit to Eton’s drama department, but, unlike many private schools, the college itself has often fought shy of putting itself in the picture. In modern times, this reluctance may
have had something to do with Another Country (1984), the launch pad for Rupert
54 School Life, Spring 2013
Everett and Colin Firth. The ne plus ultra of public-school films, it was based on the life of spy and traitor Guy Burgess. They were ready to shoot it at Eton (Burgess was OE as well as KGB), and then someone read the script. Cut-glass accents and peacock waistcoats, fine, but homosexuality, mother love, crashing snobbery, hypocrisy, black- mail and flagrant indolence? Eton reputedly demurred. Barely a few years earlier, it had been congratulating itself on a pivotal role in the British film of the decade, Chariots of Fire (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson (OE, of course), in which it stood in for Gonville and Caius and Trinity, Cambridge. For A Yank at Eton (1942), not one single
scene was filmed at or near Windsor; instead, it was shot entirely in the USA with the school ‘licensing’ its name. As the plot revolved around the misunder- standings of a bumptious American student encountering immutable English tradition
—and with the humourless Britons coming off badly—this turned out to be a wise move for a forgettable film. Not that Etonians had things their own
way all the time. Ian Fleming (OE) named his baddies after people he knew at school: Blofeld and, from The Man with The Golden Gun (filmed in 1974), Scaramanga, with whom he scrapped with regularly and is said to have particularly loathed. As a rule and as a genre, the public-
school film tends towards the unedifying. It’s almost never The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), nor is it always The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954). In fact, it’s usually far more dangerous. In Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), the boarding school becomes a hotbed of the counterculture. With its sedition and moral introspection, a mad matron, a sexually dubious chaplain, exces- sive corporal punishment and Arthur Lowe in charge, something was bound to give.
www.countrylife.co.uk
British Lion/The Kobal Collection; 20th Century Fox/Allied Stars/ Enigma/The Kobal Collection; Two Arts/CD/The Kobal Collection
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