The School Film: A British Genre?

Abstract

In 1994, the British Film Institute commissioned a documentary series on national cinemas to commemorate the centenary of the motion picture industry. The opening instalment, entrusted to Leicester-born director Stephen Frears, begins by quoting François Truffaut on ‘a certain incompatibility between the terms “cinema” and “Britain”’ (1978: 140). Retorting over the title-card with a robust ‘well, bollocks to Truffaut!’, Typically British (Channel 4, 2 September 1994), Frears’ ‘Personal History of British Cinema’, commences with a sequence of clips from British school films, each showing a teacher either promising to cane or soundly caning a pupil. First to account is Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) where the ferociously hirsute Headmaster (Lyn Harding) informs a cowering class of his intention to thrash them all: ‘You will present yourselves at my study tomorrow afternoon, in alphabetical order at intervals of three minutes, starting at three o’clock. I believe I can promise you that I have lost none of my vigour!’ Perhaps not, but maybe there was a leniency in the announced timing since, to ‘really tell this story’, Frears next avails himself of an archive Alfred Hitchcock interview. ‘At college’, Hitchcock recalls with his distinctive laconic delivery, ‘the method of punishment was rather a dramatic thing, I felt: if one had not done one’s prep, the form master would say “Go for three!” Going for three, that was a sentence. And it was a sentence as though it were spoken by a judge.’ Frears explains how Hitchcock’s teachers would tell him on a Monday that he was going to be beaten on a Friday and concludes ‘that’s how he learnt about suspense’. As we reflect on that (frequently cited) formative connection with Hitchcock’s own ‘masters of suspense’ at his Jesuit boarding school, St Ignatius College, London (Russell Taylor 1978: 29–30; McGilligan 2003: 18–20), we cut to Housemaster (1938) where Otto Kruger takes two canes from his office cupboard and tests them to decide which would—at the appointed hour—have greater purchase (Fig. 1.1). While Frears recollects how his class would gather every Saturday afternoon to watch films that ‘the school thought appropriate for children to watch: George Formby; Will Hay; typically British films, often about school itself’, we witness Alastair Sim beating a pupil in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) and a similar scene from The Guinea Pig (1948) where Leicester’s finest, Richard Attenborough, is caned for burning the toast. As Frears recounts that the first film he saw at school was Boys Will Be Boys (1935), the extract shown reverses the power dynamics, with headmaster Hay being tossed on a blanket by his pupils outside the school gates—‘in that very British, benign sort of way’, Frears notes. The sequence ends with Frears recalling the British school film on which he worked as Assistant Director, Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968). This was much less benign: as the rebellious Crusaders (Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan) take aim from the roof tops of Cheltenham College, Frears concludes: ‘We shot the headmaster in If….!’