8 out of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Girl Power from the 1950s
A Customer from Cardiff, Wales,
19th May, 2005
Are the girls of St Trinian's a good advertisement for co-ed state education, a teenage boy's dream world (all those long female legs and stocking tops), a celebration of girl-power or a satirical commentary on the British education system and society at large? The two films on this DVD are the first two of the five films to date about the terrible girl's private school invented by the brilliant cartoonist Ronald Searle. Searle's series of cartoons ended in 1953 when he reported that the girls had destroyed their school in an atomic explosion. The first film appeared in the following year. In 'The Belles of St Trinian's' that famous experimental educationalist, headmistress Millicent Fritton (Alastair Sim), discovering that her school is bankrupt, bets the remaining school cash on a racehorse belonging to the father of one of the fourth-form girls (year 10 in modern terms), which the girls assure her is a dead cert. to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup. However, her brother Clarence (also played by Alastair Sim) has his own horse running in that race and is determined to go to any length to ensure it wins. His daughter Bella, in St Trinian's sixth form, enlists her co-students to help her father, resulting in kidnap and battle in the corridors of the school. The film also introduces George Cole as Flash Harry the spiv who does business for the schoolgirls, Mr Basset (Richard Wattis) as the long-suffering official at the Ministry of Education, and the interminable romance between Police Sergeant Ruby Gates (Joyce Grenfell) and her 'Sammy', the Chief Inspector of Barchester Police. The plot of 'Blue Murder at St Trinian's' is more complex, but my teenage son and I think this film is the funnier of the two: there are some lovely moments of humour and satire and we see more of the girls' methods of operation. Millicent Fritton is in prison, the school staff have resigned and the army has moved in to protect the public from the girls of St Trinian's. Meanwhile Flash Harry, who runs St Trinian's marriage bureau for the sixth-form girls, has arranged for the entire sixth form to go to Italy to meet a highly eligible Italian prince. By pulling a few strings he and the girls manage to win a UNESCO competition that will enable them to travel to Italy. But without a headmistress they can't go ... until the father of one of the sixth-formers turns up, on the run from the police. The film also stars Richard Wattis, Eric Barker and Peter Jones (later famous as the voice of 'the book' from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy') as the suffering Min. of Ed. officals, Joyce Grenfell as Ruby Gates, assigned to accompany the schoolgirls in her hunt for the wanted criminal, Terry-Thomas as the owner of the Dreadnought Bus Company that transports the girls to Italy, and Sabrina as the School Swot.
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