Facing page The young cast of The Belles of St Trinian’s causes mayhem. Right Chariots of Fire was filmed at Eton College
Chuck in a cache of armaments in the CCF shed, a couple of barricades and some stylish scarves, and Paris 1968 comes to Chelten- ham College. It’s a Götterdämmerung of adolescent revolt, the end credits echoing to the rattle of sten guns. Cheltenham, the chief location, bagged
£1,000 a day for three weeks (still debated: was the film’s move from colour into black and white for reasons of surrealism or lack of funds?). It may have been Anderson’s alma mater, but much of the grim content came from scriptwriter David Sherwin’s memories of Tonbridge School. Aldenham School and Uppingham were fallbacks, and negotiations with Charterhouse and Cranleigh reportedly went well until the script was delivered. What Anderson should have done is taken
a leaf out of Lord of the Flies’s book (1963)—literally. Director Peter Brook apparently gave the parents of each school- boy cast member a version of the text with the most eyebrow-raising scenes removed, especially the frenzied pig’s-head- on-a-stick moment. The year 1971 saw the release of Unman,
Wittering and Zigo. The title sounds like a firm of undertakers, and that’s not too far off the mark. It’s a creepy schoolboy murder mystery, in which a new master arrives to discover his predecessor was murdered by Unman and Wittering, with Zigo keeping lookout. Naturally, he’s to be next. There was nothing Old Carthusian scriptwriter Simon Raven liked more than sending up his alma mater, a lifelong preoccupation. He ended his days in an almshouse paid for by… Charterhouse.
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and Arthur Lowe in charge, something was bound to give
With a mad matron Where was something wholesome to
redress the balance? Step forward Goodbye Mr Chips (the remake), which came out in 1970. A musical featuring Petula Clark and Peter O’Toole, it was as fluffy as matron’s poodle—and about as tuneful. Nothing came out of it well, except Sherborne. But only because it got no songs. Scriptwriter Terence Rattigan had form: The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951, with Sherborne again at its most photogenic), both scripted from his
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own plays, are masterpieces of the genre. In case you’re wondering, Hogwarts
doesn’t count. No one but Ludwig of Bavaria, whose Neuschwanstein the celluloid version so clearly resembles, would see in it any- thing less than absurdity. No one, that is, apart from those people who voted in an online ranking of Scottish schools and put it 36th in terms of excellence, above Loretto School in Edinburgh. Pity poor Loretto, but other schools have
been equally luckless. ‘Ranley’, the upper- crust school we are determinedly not rooting for when the working-class hero of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) comes up against it is one letter away from an Oxfordshire institution. And if ever the Rugby of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951) recovered from the impulsive sadism of Flashman, then it must surely have relapsed after the West End version starring Keith Chegwin and Russell Grant. On the whole, girls’ boarding schools
tend to fare rather poorly, too. Of course, St Trinian’s is in a class of its own. But for every breezy Angela Brazil, there’s a suffocating hothouse melodrama. This often comes with a Sapphic undertow, ending up either with the school’s governing body hoping to put ‘the unpleasantness’ behind them without any parents—or, indeed, the audience —finding out just quite what the unpleas- antness was, or with the police being quickly involved. Shall we blame cult German classic Mädchen in Uniform (1931)? I feel we must. Although we need not dwell too long on this masterpiece of middle-European Expressionism, suffice to say that To Serve Them All My Days
Director Peter Brook chose 30 out of 3,000 candidates to film in the school holidays when he made Lord of the Flies (1963)
it is not. But then again, what is? My own school was not entirely unaf-
fected. When it was announced that the then-defiantly single-sex Edinburgh Academy was to star in a film, everyone was whipped into a frenzy of anticipation. When it transpired we were to be the Marcia Blaine School for Girls (!) in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), you could hear the sound of no hands clapping. The crew turned instead to the more photogenic school for the deaf next door, and the Academy’s moment in the sun was over before it had begun. Which, in the end, may have been no bad thing.
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