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Curiously, the picture's faults fade beneath the glaze of its magnificent production. Moss Hart has woven his garland of Shakespearean forget-me-nots with the banal dexterity of a professional cigar-wrapper; Director Philip Dunne has managed to make most of his actors overplay their parts to the same degree. The color is creamy, the camera expert, the cutting shrewd. In fact, as is the case with many Fox pictures during CinemaScope's first year, a mediocre idea (and often it has been a downright bad one) has been made into a piece of gleamingly proficient, machine-tooled entertainment.
The Belles of St. Trinian's (Launder-Gilliat; Associated Artists) are the female objects depicted in Ronald Searle's well-known cartoons on the subject of Regressive Education in Britain (TIME, Sept. 20). St. Trinian's, on the screen as in the scribbles, is a finishing school with a difference: it is not the students but the teachers who get finished. The school motto: In Flagranti Delicto. The curriculum offers a wide selection of illiberal arts and quite a few handy crafts. In chemistry, for instance, some of the younger girls make a still. Its product is properly bottled, labeled ("St. Trinian's Gin") and distributed by a local bootlegger (George Cole) who is also on the payroll as the school bookmaker and general spiv. Nitroglycerin is also concocted, but not often used. Arson is discouraged unless the school buildings that are burned happen also to be insured.
At hockey the St. Trinian's girls literally wipe up the field with their opponents, and yet the indoor sports—dropping a battle-ax on an unwary master, stretching an informer on a homemade rack—are more popular. The teaching staff, like the student body, has been formed on St. Trinian's Law: survival of the misfittest. The headmistress herself, a sort of middle-aged Wedgwood sylph with a shifty eye and just the faintest mustache (the part is played by Alastair Sim), is not above "borrowing" her pupils' pocket money, and the rest of the staff is best known by the faculty room it keeps. "It smells," a visitor remarks, "like a powder room in Port Said."
During the period examined by this film, the girls go so far, in an attempt to win a horse race on which their bank roll is riding, as to steal the favorite and hide him in their dormitory. "Girls, girls!" the headmistress exclaims. "How often have I told you that pets are not allowed?" What really worries her is that, for some reason, the local cops have secretly planted a police spy (Joyce Grenfell) on her staff; if the horse theft were discovered, it might give the school a bad name, and besides, her own bank roll happens to be riding on that very horse.
* In real life they were mostly vegetables of the mind. The day after Lincoln died, Edwin Booth, who was playing Hamlet in Boston, was kicked out of the theater. Threatening letters ("Revolvers are loaded with which to shoot you down") crammed his mailbox. For some weeks he dared not show his face on the street; for nine months he dared not show it on the stage. Booth eventually lived the scandal down, but he never got over the shock of it; from that day till his death he refused to play in Washington.