The Happiest Days of Your Life

From the golden period of British films, this has my vote for one of the funniest of all time. Screened yesterday at my Film Society to a rapturous audience, I was astonished at how well the comedy has lasted (made in 1950!). It is really down to the expert timing and inimitable playing from two of the finest actors Britain has produced: Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim. Adapted from a play by John Dighton, this farce is briskly handled by director Frank Launder. The plot is simple: A ministry mistake billets a girls' school on a boys' school. I will always laugh when I think of this film.

No point in giving too many plot details here, just take the basic premise of an all girls school being assigned to an all boys school by mistake, add that on the same day the girl's headmistress has to show a group of visiting parents around while the boy's headmaster (who is due to be promoted to a senior position at a new college) has to show his new employers around and I think you'll get the picture.

This fifty year old comedy wears well. The pace is frantic, like a French farce with doors opening and closing and much dashing along corridors with split second timing as the two groups try to avoid each other. Magaret Rutherford and Alistair Sim ham it up superbly and there are many familiar faces in the supporting cast, all of whom react with great professionalism. At ninety minutes the film doesn't out stay it's welcome, and there's even time for a little romance that doesn't slow up the action one bit. Incidentally I had forgotten how sexy the gym outfits of English schoolgirls of that period were. It bought back memories.

This film is just plain lovely. It's funny as hell and as old as the hills. The acting is superb and it's fascinating seeing post-war Britain and how we used to behave in those days. This seems to have been some pre-runner to the St. Trinians films (given the Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford connection - there's also a very young George Cole in there who appeared in many St. Trinians films) but I don't myself understand the connection. It was shown on BBC4 recently after a biography of St. Trinians creator Ronald Searle, however I missed enough of the biography to miss the connection with this film. Anyway a great film in its own right and something that should be preserved for all time!

I seldom write 'over-the-top' reviews, but, in my opinion, Happiest Days of Your Life is the funniest of all comedies issued during Britain's golden era (late 1940s-early 1950s) of filmed fun. Directed by Frank Launder, Happiest Days of Your Life provides peerless comedy actors Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Richard Wattis, Muriel Aked, Guy Middleton and Edward Rigby with a witty script by John Dighton & Frank Launder filled with opportunities to perform at their best. Although the film is laugh-out-loud funny, convulsively so, at times, it provides a sharply satiric critique of a no-longer-so-Great Britain as it stumblingly tries to negotiate in a few years time a century of bureaucratic transition from ossified Victorian empire to a modern welfare state amid the wreckage and turmoil following WWII. I suggest that Happiest Days of Your Life ranks with the best work by Keaton, Chaplin, Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Monty Python and Mel Brooks.

This film, without doubt, is the clearest example of the British humour the Germans can't understand. One-liners run rampant in a film spawning one of the greatest series of films in British cinema history (St.Trinians). The story of bureaucratic incompetence amid post-war trials enables Frank Launder to direct maximum talent from all the cast. It's probably the only film in which Margaret Rutherford meets her match, in Alastair Sim, for forceful characterisation (she still wins though). Joyce Grenfell (bless her) and Richard Wattis both deserve mentions in Dighton's masterpiece of English etiquette and stiff upper lip under pressure.

No Rutherford/Sim/Grenfell fan would be without this in their collection. Absolutely brilliant. Why 9/10? Only 83mins long.