The Belles of St Trinian's: girls behaving badly. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
The story of the St Trinian's series and the capers of its anarchic schoolgirls is one of constant evolution, increasingly refined wit and ever giddier heights of cinematic excellence - so long as you set your face in the right direction through time.
Let's start then, with 2007 and the nadir of the St. Trinian's series, with Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Russell Brand, all of whom deserve the ducking stool treatment for involving themselves with this sorrowful, sexist farrago. Everett pathetically contrived to justify St Trinian's as an indictment of our education system when interviewed at the Leicester Square preview but given that the film's funniest moment involves the third-hand, tenth-rate device of a dog flying out of a window, this is desperately spurious. Still, this was the 21st century, with audiences yet to undergo the feminist revolution of the 1970s. No such excuse for 1980's The Wildcats Of St Trinian's, the series' equivalent of Carry On Emmanuelle - a plotline about the girls forming a trade union lies somewhere in the background like a discarded skipping rope as the glamorous likes of the late Debbie Linden cavort in, and often out of suspenders to salacious but mirthless effect. Still, at least Frank Lauder oversaw the project, a hopeful sign of things to come.
Sure enough, 1966's The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery, while no masterpiece and involving Reg Varney, at least saw George Cole in his role as Flash Harry offer a touch of slippery, cockney class, while Frankie Howerd gurned and punned to reasonable effect as the criminal ringleader.
Come 1960 and the series embarked upon its finest decade.The Pure Hell Of St Trinian's showed marked signs of improvement with both Frank Lauder and Sydney Gilliat at the helm, while Britain's finest-ever comedy actress Joyce Grenfell joined George Cole among the regulars as the love-starved Sergeant Ruby Gates. Blue Murder at St Trinian's was a further upgrade, with the girls now representing more of a a backdrop of anarchic, noisy oestrogen-fuelled rebellion similar in spirit to the Ronald Searle cartoons which inspired the series, rather than mere soft porn for patheticos.
Nineteen fifty-four brought the glory of The Belles of St Trinian's, with Alastair Sim offering not just a masterclass in cross dressing as Miss Fritton but also a whole gamut of comedic facial agonies and twitches denoting hangdog moral compromise. Even this was topped, however, by 1950's The Happiest Days Of Your Life, based on a play by Ealing stalwart John Dighton, which ditches the St Trinian's concept altogether with Sim, Grenfell ("effort, St Swithin's, effort!") joined by the formidable Margaret Rutherford in a farce involving a boys' and girls' school made to share the same building. In its exquisitely dispatched one-liners, elaborately unfolding plot and delicious marinade of irony it's perhaps the funniest British film yet made. Happy days indeed.
