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Post by dem bones on Oct 20, 2007 10:10:26 GMT
Frank Launder - The Wildcats Of St. Trinians (Armada, 1980) Armada ?!!! "Free ice-cream, chewing gum, cigarettes, nylons and make-up. All girls over the age of ten to have the right to see 'X' films ...."St. Trinians, an unspecified date in the 1970's, and despite a huge staff overhaul, it is still very much business as usual. The new headmistress, latest in a proud succession of embezzlers, is one-eyed, erotic novel ogling Olga Vandemeer who realised what she was up against the first and leaves the girls to their own devices under the guise of being "a great believer in freedom of expression ... Do your own things, but if possible, darlings, within reason." She lives in mortal fear of the school being the subject of yet another expose in the Sunday People. Her staff include ineffectual henchwoman, Miss Martingale, the bruiser 'Smoky' MacTavish, torture advocating Miss Coke, Connie Wadsworth (scripture, frequent excursions to The Rose & Crown), Miss Wormold (chemistry, frequent excursions to the A & E department of the local hospital), Miss Adams - "a curvaceous blonde of sub 'o'-level mentality (sports and involuntary nude hitch-hiking) and various lesser hoods, burn outs and cardsharps. Flash Harry is still a fixture (he must be getting on a bit), running a Chinese Restaurant on the premises to supplement the income he earns from the "authentic Russian Vodka" the girls distill in Miss Wormwood's class. The star of the show is fourteen year old revolutionary and fledgling bent politician Lizzie Stratton, secretary of the St. Trinians Action Committee, who, inspired by Flash Harry's appalling example, dreams up the British Schoolgirl Union and draws up the girls' list of unequivocal demands. Her mentor points out that threatening to go on strike isn't likely to cut much ice with the Ministry of Education as none of the girls does any work to begin with and the best bet is to infiltrate all the top schools and expand the Union. This is how they come to kidnap a Princess, Roxanne, and nearly spark a diplomatic incident with the Arabs. Sir Charles Hackworth and his stooges at the Ministry connive to scupper the BSU by striking a shady deal with LADS, the Left Action Democratic Students: "Their reputation as advertised in the Left Wing press and on TV discussion programmes was one of determination to be more doggedly way-out and bloody minded than any other youth organisation which was way-out and bloody minded." Disappointingly, the LADS' uniform consists of jeans, old pullovers, windcheaters and sandals, and some of them have beards so despite being published in 1980, it looks like Wildcats ... was written a good few years earlier. Despite the style handicap, the LADS lure bikini-clad Mavis ("the school sex-pot") and her sixth form colleagues from the picket line and invite them aboard The Saltsea Queen for a 'Southern Seas' themed fancy dress party in their honour. Primed by Sir Charles, the LADS' agenda is to get the girls to amalgamate with them to boost their own membership and manipulate the Schoolgirls' Union for their own ends. Lizzie sees straight through this and sends an Armada to attack the The Saltsea Queen and deal with the 'traitors.' The LADS are bashed and half-stripped by the filthy fifth, ditto Mavis and colleagues, and the Wildcats triumph. Questions are raised in the house, Sir Charles and his sycophants are forced to agree to the St. Trinians girls' humiliating additional demands - in other words, the outcome is exactly as you'd wish it to be with even Princess Roxanne playing a blinder toward the end. I've never liked Carry On At Your Convenience which always struck me as a splenetic attack on the Trade Unions masquerading as a comedy, but Wildcats ... is far more enjoyable, quite simply because it's a pop at everything that isn't St. Trinians. In 125 pages you're not going to get too much by way of characterisation and some of the teachers and pupils are little more than names on the page, but as novelisations go, it's a super-fast, fun read, and definitely worth picking up if you find a copy lurking in your favourite second hand haunt. Dare I ask if the photo pages are stuck together? weird it's Armada - it wasn't a kids movie, just a movie with kids... just shows how confused the St Trinians legacy had got by then. And that prat who replaces George Cole as Flash Harry (Joe Melia?) is awful... It sounds a cracker. I wouldn't mind betting the film was originally scripted years before and got caught up in development hell - I think one of Launder and Gilliat got caught up in heading up a fading British Lion which kind of screwed things up (wihtout recourse to Alexander Walker - long since discarded - I'm going on memory) and kept them out of active production for a while. Mind, times were going against them, making it harder to get movies of their type made. Totally agree with you about Carry On At Your Convenience, btw - smacks of old tory Peter Rogers grinding a few axes. Considering he made some of the movies I reme ber most findly from youth, he really is a nasty old piece of work. Allegedly. The overage school girl? Not sure of her name - she's the same girl who gets shagged silly as a student in The History Man, so if I've picked the right name from the entry in The Penguin TV Guide, then her name is Veronica Quilligan. Anyone able to confirm that I got the right one? I couldn't remember the character name in The History Man, so I may have picked out the wrong actress!
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Post by dem bones on Aug 9, 2009 15:06:19 GMT
Pippa Le Quesne (From a screenplay by Piers Ashworth & Nick Moorcroft) - St. Trinians (Penguin, 2007) Blurb: St Trinian's is in crisis.
The notorious school for young 'ladies' has been threatened with closure and needs to find funds, fast. A whole host of ungovernable and downright unruly pranksters (and that includes the teachers) are game on to pull off the heist of the century.
Their plan? Steal an extremely famous painting from the National Gallery. Right under the noses of the authorities, of course. But can their combined cunning and total lack of shame save the day before school is out - for good?Wonder what Ronald Searle would have made of this? I've not seen the film yet (too mortified at prospect of encountering Girls Aloud on soundtrack) and wasn't much enthused about reading this novelisation either but, to give Pippa Le Quesne and the screenwriters their due, it's just about in keeping with the spirit of Searle's cartoons. As a very contemporary take on this nation's finest ever school, it's pupils are nowadays a more cosmopolitan bunch: the usual hooligan terrors share dorm-space with Wannabe WAGS and some lovably death-obsessed EMO's (the foremost of whom, Andrea, or ' the Corpse Bride' as she's referred to by a sneering classmate, gets to utter/ wind up on the receiving end of the best lines). The feel-good, ultra-flimsy but servicable plot follows the fortunes of straight-laced new girl at St. Trinians, Annabelle, daughter of dastardly art dealer Carnaby Fitton. Annabelle has transferred in from Cheltenham Ladies College where she was mercilessly bullied. Her chief tormentor at Cheltenham, Head Girl Verity Thwaites, is the daughter of MP and hardline prison reformer Geoffrey Thwaites who has now set his sites on closing Britain's most notorious academy. St. Trinians is also under attack from Annabelle's unscrupulous father, the aforementioned Carnaby, who has a half-share in the property and wants the site for property development. Naturally, when the girls hear the old dump is to be demolished they are delighted - until the feisty and suss Head Girl, Kelly Jones points out that, should it go they'll all be sent to "normal schools." Clearly a BIG PLAN is called for and Annabelle, who, up until now has been treated with even more spite by her new colleagues than she endured at Cheltenham, finally earns their respect by masterminding an audacious plot to save the school and fix her scumbag father. Just as the Confessions ... paperbacks double as some kind of treasury of 1970's pop-culture moments, St. Trinians is a grab-bag of mid-noughties references (YouTube, iPod's, Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island, Kylie, J-Lo, Damien Hirst and his dead animal in formaldehyde fetish, Colin Firth & Scarlett Johannsson, credit card fraud, Paris bloody Hilton, etc.) and the fact that it comes in at 148 pages of DEAD BIG print means you can polish it off in under an hour then spend the rest of the day studying the eight-page photo supplement for fashion tips.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 6, 2012 18:17:18 GMT
D. B. Wyndham Lewis & Ronald Searle - The Terror Of St. Trinians (Ian Henry, 1976: originally Max Parrish, 1952 as by 'Timothy Shy' ) The blurb: An excursion into the uncontrolled mayhem of one of the most famous of girls' schools.
Some of the principal characters -
Miss Umbrage: Headmistress Of St. Trinians
Miss Athene Fridge: English Mistress and beloved of ...
... Rupert Rover of the Board of Education
Chloe Languish: Head Girl, who nurtures a pure girl's love for Rupert.
Angela Menace: a senior girl, who has decided she wants Rupert.
Mr. Menace: Angela's financier father.
Mr. Weisenheim; another financier.
Mr. Rump: President of the Board of Education.
Fay Clattering, Dinty Whackstraw, Hernia Rampage, Opal Mildew, Una Clumpany, Nancy Turbulence, et alia: typical St. Trinians young ladies.
The school was founded, rather reluctantly, in their final years, just before the torch of British women's education fell from their tired hands, by those famous pioneers, Miss Buss and Miss Beale, who, as Ruskin once remarked, went all too Hell after Cheltenham.
.... And things haven't improved Which of his three admirers will the obscenely wealthy Rupert Rover lead up the aisle? Chloe Languish, beautiful, pure as the driven snow and total teacher's pet? The delightfully bad Angela Menace, ruthless, thoroughly wicked but at least she doesn't pretend otherwise? You'd be forgiven for writing off Miss Athene Fudge (B.A.) as a non-starter, but even Angela has to admit that, in all her young years, she's never met a more challenging opponent: "slim, pale, impassive as marble, with a heart apparently of the same material and a Grecian perfection of profile." If love and romance doesn't do it for you then you'll appreciate the periodic reminders of St. Trinians' glorious past, littered as it is with mutiny ("the armed uprising of 1881"), bloodshed and even witchcraft. There's also an exciting chapter when Angela sets the school ablaze (so she can heroically save the Head, Miss Umbrage) as the girls engage in pitched battles with the Fire Brigade. When the School Governors learn what Miss Menace has done, they meet to consider her expulsion. Predictably, when Angela's loyal subjects learn of their ingratitude, this leads to yet another riot . My copy is a defaced ex-library job, the most likely vandal being some pesky kid who couldn't hack Wyndham-Lewis's prose style, and I can sympathise - he doesn't seem entirely suited to the job unless the idea really was to pitch the book at adults? It doesn't matter much in the end because I suspect Wyndham-Lewis is only there to give some kind of narrative structure to Searle's glorious cartoons (chillingly, the girls' stick-insect bodies were reputedly "inspired" by the emaciated bodies of fellow prisoners of war labouring on the Siam-Burma railway). Top stuff! Never been able to track down any of the St Trinians books - but I was raised on Searle & Geoffrey Willans (?) St Custards/Nigel Molesworth tales - Down With Skool, Whizz For Atoms and Back In The Jug Agane - as any fule kno - chiz chiz. Wyndham Lewis was better known as Timothy Shy at the time, as I believe it says in the book, and before that he was the second Beachcomber in the Express, succeeding some army bloke, and preceeding the great JB Morton, who did the column for fifty years from 1924-74. Like early Morton and a number of Punch writers of the 20's and 30's, Wyndham Lewis' stuff was whimsical absurdity, which mostly probably reads terribly today (I reserve judgement as I have a weakness for between the wars writing of all kinds that blinds me to relative merits). I suspect he was chosen as he's trying to pitch the book as partly parody of school stories, and partly of the romances of Ethel M Dell and her ilk (as parodied superbly in Wodehouse). Which it works as, if you're aware of those writers (Elsie J Oxenham springs to mind). But if not, it seems lame. The Molesworth books, however, are still sharp, as Willans was an excellent journalist and humourist (I have a book about flying called Fasten Your Lapstraps, illustrated by someone else and pre-Molesworth which is still funny). We should be glad the St Trins novel was an artistic flop (though commercially successful), as W-L dropping out caused Max Parrish to seek out Willans (Lapstraps is a Max Parrish book) and pair him with Searle. The rest is history for schoolboys everywhere, as any fule kno. (resurrected from Vault Mk I) In memory of Robert Searle who died on December 30th 2011
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Post by redbrain on Mar 27, 2012 20:04:09 GMT
Pippa Le Quesne (From a screenplay by Piers Ashworth & Nick Moorcroft) - St. Trinians (Penguin, 2007) Wonder what Ronald Searle would have made of this? I've not seen the film yet (too mortified at prospect of encountering Girls Aloud on soundtrack) I wonder whether you've seen the film by now? I really enjoyed it. But, then, I'm a Girls Aloud fan which (inexplicably) you don't seem to be. Actually there isn't much of Girls Aloud in the soundtrack (shame!). I own both the DVD and the soundtrack CD... I haven't tackled the novel, though. |
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Post by redbrain on Mar 27, 2012 20:12:03 GMT
The Wildcats of Trinians is the only St Trinians film I haven't seen (and the only one that hasn't appeared on DVD).
It'd be great to have a chance to see this intriguing film. I don't suppose it's likely to be shown on television, or in a year 2012 cinema. Although cinemas might screen it if some enterprising person turned it into a 3D flick. If they can do it with Titanic, why not Wildcats of St Trinians?
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Post by pulphack on Mar 28, 2012 17:53:36 GMT
Unlike most people I know I really like the two new St Trin's films (especially Rupert in drag and Mr D'Arcy, who are great together) ad reckon they're exactly how Launder & Gilliatt would have handled it if they had still been alive and working.
Perhaps Wildcats hasn't hit DVD as there are issues over who actually owns copyright - is it a dormant compnay or has it slipped into public domain without a viable print available? It wasn't under a studio auspice as the first four were, and this might be why it's frustratingly unavailable - must be 20 years since I last saw it appear on TV?
To backtrack to Timothy Shy - DB Wyndham Lewis had been Bechcomber before JB Morton and was also known as an authority on bad verse and writer of comic verse. Highly skilled, I spect he was asked to write a parody of old school stories to accompany the text and it's dated poorly - indeed, as the form is almost self-parodic when read now it didn't really need it, and nothing dates worse than a pisstake of something already absurd.
It would have been better if it had an iconoclastic text like Geoffrey Willans' for the St Custard's books - which Searle only did as a favour to Willans after the original text had appeared in Punch, and because he'd promised the publisher a new book following the St Trin's novel and couldn't face going back to a girls school!
Nigel Molesworth was my hero as a 10 year old (alongside Jason King), though I suspect I was more like Fotherington-Thomas...
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Mar 30, 2012 18:37:20 GMT
Unlike most people I know I really like the two new St Trin's films (especially Rupert in drag and Mr D'Arcy, who are great together) ad reckon they're exactly how Launder & Gilliatt would have handled it if they had still been alive and working. I'm another fan of the revived St Trinians, which I thought definitely caught the feel of the classic films (so NOT 'Wildcats', then). I'd be very happy if there was a third film, as I thought the second one managed to improve on the first, and I liked the first to begin with. |
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Post by redbrain on Jun 19, 2014 14:10:56 GMT
I've discovered (and bought, and watched) a DVD of Wildcats of St Trinian's. It's not the best St Tininan's film, but it is the hardest to find and most expensive to buy. Attachments:
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Post by redbrain on Jun 20, 2014 9:07:34 GMT
Having recently seen 'Wildcats of St Trinian's' for the first time, the film has made me think -- which is a good thing. Less of a good thing is what it's made me think: what's wrong with this film? It contains some good jokes and satisfying scenes of schoolgirl anarchy... and yet...
Two things have occurred me. One is the character of Flash Harry. The other strikes at the very heart of the film.
Flash Harry first. In the first four films, he was played as a comic spiv by George Cole. The comic spiv was developed by Arthur English and perhaps rose to its zenith in the form of Private Walker of Dad's Army. A spiv was a petty criminal, taking advantage of wartime and post war shortages. The comic version does no real harm, unlike (I have no doubt) real spivs. In the first St Trinian's film, The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), Flash Harry was a boot boy the school had taken on in 1940. In the chaos of the war, presumably, the headmistress Miss Fritton has lost track of him, he's vanished into the shrubbery (seemingly literally) and now assists the girls (amongst other things) by selling the bathtub gin they distill. All of this seems to make enough sense for the purposes of the film. In the following films, the boot boy nonsense seems forgotten. George Cole continues to play Flash Harry as a comic spiv and does so with sufficient charm for us to all but overlook some of the dodgier agenda (such as his acting as a marriage bureau for the schoolgirls).
In Wildcats, the role of Flash Harry is played with a lot less charm by Joe Melia. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the makers of all five of the films 1954-80, seem to have recognised that the idea of the comic spiv no longer works. Flash Harry is restored to his role of school boot boy: an idea that no longer works in 1980. He also runs the local Chinese restaurant and take away, an idea that wouldn't have worked at any time. As a boot boy, he's a left wing trade union organiser -- something I found impossible to square with his being the entrepreneur of the local Chinese eatery. (Eh?) And how could school boot boys form an effective militant trade union? The thing clearly makes no sense at all. Perhaps George Cole could have carried it off, perhaps not. Alas, Joe Melia fails to do so.
The second great problem, as I said, strikes to the heart of the film. The plot concerns the girls forming a schoolgirls trade union. As such, it makes no sense. How could striking schoolgirls bring the nation to its knees? But there's a bigger problem. Following the winter of discontent, perhaps unsurprisingly, the film carries a strong element of union bashing. On the other hand, like all St Trinian's films, it's firmly on the side of the girls. (Were a St Trinian's film to present the girls other than as the [anti?] heroes, it would be unbearable.) But the girls are the trade unionists. Consequently, the film attempts to gallop in opposite directions -- supporting the girls, but opposed to trade unions (which, in this case, comprises the girls the film supports). Tugged hard in both directions, the film falls apart. What on earth were Launder and Gilliat thinking?
It makes a sad end to the 1954-80 films. That said, there remains quite a lot to enjoy.
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