At 01:09 27/10/00 -0500, you wrote:

>I'm obviously focusing on "boy-films," mainly because the only girl-type
>boarding-school movies I can come up with are something called The Trouble
>with Angels (which I've not seen); and Mädchen in Uniform, which has been
>just done to death by the gender- and lesbian-studies crowd.

Two British series of films may be of interest.  Firstly, the music hall
comedian Will Hay appeared as a hopelessly incompetent schoolteacher at a
second rate public (translation: fee-paying) boarding school in the 30s and
40s.  The best examples are, IMHO, 'Boys will be Boys' (1935) and 'Good
Morning, Boys' (1936), although in later years the formula was adapted as
war propaganda, most notably in 'The Goose Steps Out' (1941), in which Hay,
parachuted behind enemy lines, finds himself teaching at a Gestapo training
school (it includes an unforgettable scene in which he teaches the recruits
to make a 'v' sign, explaining that it was a British mark of respect for
'our glorious fuhrer').  With ref to an earlier thread, these films are
extremely class conscious, with a lot of the jokes being based around upper
class children collaborating with gun-runners, jewel thieves &c, whilst the
naive Will Hay is stuck in the middle (both in terms of the plot and his
social background), with no idea what is happening.

The other series is the St. Trinians films.  There were three or four (if
memory serves me correctly), made during the late 50s/early 60s and based
on the work of the cartoonist Ronald Searle.  Pretty similar stuff, only
this time at a girls' boarding school.  I'm not aware of any critical or
historical work relating to either series, except for the odd paragraph in
'history of the British cinema' survey type books.

The other film which deserves a mention is, of course, 'Les Diaboliques'
(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1952) in which the headmaster and proprietor of a
boarding school on the verge of bankruptcy conspires to murder his wife and
retire on the inheritance.

L
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