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This may be the only one of the originals to be shot in colour but I have to say I got almost nothing from it whatsoever. It irks me to say but here the kinky schoolgirl stuff evolves even further to the point where it is simply leery and smutty and not in the least bit sexy. To be honest, I’d kind of had my fill of the naughty schoolgirls by the time this one came around and I maybe didn’t give it a fair trial but it seems to me (if you’ll excuse the pun) the series had run out of steam too by this point. In 1966 cinema as a whole was on the verge of a giant tipping point that really blew up in 1967 and this whole concept is too much of the old world. I think there were still a couple of laughs to be had and if you like railways, particularly British ones, you’ll find plenty to behold – but it’s no Pure Hell.
Posts Tagged ‘b/w’
The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009“There’ll always be trouble when there’s arson around.”
This gets off to a reassuring start as the school burns to the ground and all 200 pupils find themselves in a courtroom. As I said in the Blue Murder, it would’ve been easy to spin these off every year and just do the exact same story over and over again. The girls are even more sexualised here and ironically that makes it even less shocking really, there being nothing more pathetic in my eyes to people who clearly want to admit that some schoolgirls are sexy but their only way of showing it is to cast people who look to be 10 years out of school, lol. The Hamlet soliloquy to striptease is kind of brilliant (“It’s the suspense … it’s unbearable!”) and it has as many moments as the other films in the series, but again it’s hardly comic genius.
It could be the cumulative effect of watching them all so closely together (one does always need time to adjust to the style and tone of humour in older movies), it could be the beers I had while watching 
Or it could be the image of the younger St. Trinian’s girls at the end storming an army base in tanks – nothing better in my mind than such a juxtaposition 
– but this is certainly my fave of the series so far and the one I’m likely to watch again sooner.
Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009This seems more like the St. Trinian’s I remember. What surprised me in the first of these was how many younger girls were in the cast. Here, most of the action involves cast whose average age probably rivals Grease for people playing schoolkids. There are still a handful of little ones, but this one clearly makes a move towards the “kinky schoolgirl” thing the series is perhaps unfortunately known best for. There’s some amusement as the girls hit the road and travel across Europe but this section is really a far too short montage when it could have made the whole movie. I was surprised how different the story was from the first movie – it would be easy with such a perfect set up to just bring in more girls and create more mischief in school bounds for 90 minutes. Having watched all four of the originals in one sitting, however, I must say this is one of, if not the, weakest.
The Belles of St. Trinian’s
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009You’ve gotta love a movie that begins with the sound of machine gun fire over a girls’ school sign and a simple POV shot from the inside of a schoolbus over which is laid the sounds of its students screaming maniacally. I’ve probably seen most of the movies in this series in the past, I certainly remember watching at least one of them often when I was really little (which one, I haven’t a clue) – if you can call it watching, I probably liked the idea of mischief at school but missed most of the humour entirely.
What surprised me here is how much the recent remake resembled it – I had the feeling that from the start these movies were populated with much older girls wearing the uniforms etc but was surprised by the number of younger ones present here. Speaking of the remake, I feel the same way about these original St. Trinian’s movie re: the remake as I do the old Pink Panther movies … I’ve never been one to give any immediate high regard to a work on account of its age, and when it comes to discussing the remake in general many too many blindly overpraise the originals and slam the new when in purely objective terms they’re both just pretty unremarkable in the grand scheme of cinema. I really enjoyed the new St. Trinian’s movie, and I really enjoy this – neither will make it high on my faves lists.
Love Happy
Monday, January 19th, 2009A lot less Groucho than the other two Marx Bros. movies I’ve watched this week make this one immediately more palatable to me. There are still plenty of clunker gags but I found myself smiling or, yup, even laughing more than staring flatly at the screen. There’s a beautiful scene of Harpo on the harp (he’s certainly my favourite of the bunch – hey, I have a favourite Marx brother! I guess they can’t be that bad lol) … other than that, meh, not much to say. I don’t think I could even tell you where Marilyn Monroe was in the mix, lol – I’m not sure if this speaks well for her or not.
A Day at the Races
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Again, I refer you to my review of Duck Soup for my thoughts on most of this kind of comedy. This one’s 30 minutes longer to boot. There is however, like the mirror scene there that I loved, a great scene here involving the destruction of a piano. The dance sequences deservedly earned these movies their only competitive Oscar … but, meh, I’m even less hot for dancing than I am for silly comedy. Maureen O’Sullivan is gorgeous, though.
Duck Soup
Thursday, January 15th, 2009I’ve gotta be honest (I’ve gotta, or I wouldn’t even bother running this site lol) – I really should’ve just given these movies a wide berth because I knew they wouldn’t be my kind of humour, but I’m trying to catch up with a lot of movies I really should’ve seen as a “film lover” this year and this is always appearing on peoples’ best of all-time lists.
Well, what can I say but I can think of easily a hundred better ways to spend my time that don’t even involve film, lol. Some people seem to excuse cheesy (in a bad way) gags so long as they’re old or “charming” … not me, I’m afraid. I like a lot of the old fast-talking comedies I’ve seen, like those of Howard Hawks, so this isn’t like an, “eww, black and white!” issue, either. This just didn’t make me laugh anywhere near enough to swing me round to the Marx brothers – Groucho in particular is just about the most annoying screen presence I can imagine, in fact. He’s like a Little Britain sketch or something – “Guy Who Has To Make Wise Crack About Everything Even If There Isn’t Any Wise To Crack”.
The mirror scene, on the other hand, is pretty fantastic
Alice in Wonderland [1966]
Sunday, May 4th, 2008This one is fascinating – another TV production, this time by the BBC for the “Wednesday Play” series, and boy does that show: the word “pretentious” certainly comes to mind but I for one won’t be using it because this is one of the best adaptations of the book that I’ve yet seen. It begins by perfectly recreating the part of the story that has always been the most strongly evocative part to me: the simple, lazy image of Alice and her sister on the bank on a hazy Summer afternoon (“All in a golden afternoon …”). From there it launches into some of the most surreal, dreamlike progressions I’ve ever seen on film. It captures some part of the book that few other adaptations would dare. Through clever editing, it’s the closest and most prolonged replica of the dream experience I’ve seen.
I wouldn’t have thought it, as I’m quite attached to the innocent and gracious image of Alice in the blue dress with blonde hair in a bow etc, but I quite like this Hermione-haired, black-dressed, aloof version as played by Anne-Marie Mallik, too; I love how she’s always walking away from people with a “hmph!” flick of her hair. The look she almost gives the camera as the caucus-race “winners” gather around uttering, “prizes, prizes, prizes”, quite like zombies droning, “brains”, lol, is quite priceless, it’s the look of a person bemused by the herd-like behaviours of society.
In short, what it lacks in colour, effects, costumes and comprehensiveness, it makes up for entirely with the feeling it gives by the extraordinary stillness, both in the image and in the soundtrack, Mallik’s whispery distant voiceover, and that very BBC “Play for Today” type score (excepting the odd moment when it, like the imagery, goes a little mental). At 70 minutes, there’s no excuse to pass up the chance to see it.