The Happiest Days of Your Life (1949)

School time again, and a chance to reflect on a comedy favourite. This film has slightly been eclipsed in memory by the subsequent series of St. Trinian's comedies, but The Happiest Days of Your Life was the happiest of Launder and Gilliat's school days films.

My first awareness of the film was a retrospective at the Ipswich Film Theatre, where Suffolk-based DJ John Peel was asked about his favourite films, of which The Happiest Days of Your Life was his selection. A good deal of the enjoyment of the film is attributable to the teaming of the two main stars: just listening to them is like witnessing a comedic clash of the titans. The original play by John Dighton was a topical hit, starring Margaret Rutherford in unstoppable form as the headmistress of St. Swithin's, a girls' private school merged inexplicably on the sire of a boys' school. For adapting the play for the cinema, it fell into the hands of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who wisely chose their favourite comedy leading man opposite Ms. Rutherford: Alastair Sim.

Their supporting cast is a model of British character acting, and for once they have a decent script that matches up to their talents: the splendidly cynical and weary looking Richard Wattis as Maths master Billings, his randy sportsmaster colleague Hyde-Brown (Guy Middleton - above), and a gloriously batty, almost silent cameo by Arthur Howard (brother of Leslie) as the aloof science teacher Ramsden, the "ghost of Nutbourne". A requisite romance comes in the form of John Bentley as new English master Richard Tassell, who quickly has eyes for his female counterpart Joyce Harper (Bernadette O'Farrell - soon to become Mrs Launder); appropriately their romance is intertwined with a couple of quotes from Romeo and Juliet. There is also a fleeting hilarious cameo by Sim's 'apprentice' (and future Harry Flashman), George Cole. Best of all among the supporting players comes Joyce Grenfell as the enthusiastic sports mistress Gossage ("call me Sausage!"), who steals practically every scene she is in.

Though released in 1950 at the beginning of that pivotal decade, the date on the film is 1949 - and it belongs in many ways to that era of post-war resettlement, where schools affected by bombing or social reparation had to be relocated (Sim also makes a passing swipe at "nationalising the railways" in the era of the post-war Labour government).

In truth, it's a slight game of two halves, with the splendid ill-matching of boys' and girls' schools making way for farcical contrivances as the two try to convince their two sets of outside visitors that all is well, without revealing the true identity of their cohabitants.  As an audience this can be forgiven as Launder and Gilliat are freewheeling downhill having already been delighted for the first part, with the sharpest of British wit and the most hilarious of comedy situations - perhaps British cinema's funniest hour.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

John Huston has always been the advocate of character and situation rather than over-stylization of cinema. Huston himself has the element of the rogue adventurer about him: leaving America for Europe to study art after an already colourful childhood, then later joining the Mexican Cavalry, where he developed his talents as a writer, and then in time, back to America and Hollywood as a scriptwriter and later director.

Of his varied body of work (of which one only has to look at Escape to Victory to see how varied!), the one film of his I most admire is this one. This is a film noir with a decidedly more gritty edge - Huston himself was a pioneer of the genre with The Maltese Falcon - but this time imbued with a kind of neo-realism that was influenced by the European movement of the time, especially Italy and France. 

The protagonists in this film are those who would normally (up until then) be considered the antagonists: crooks, racketeers and general reprobates. Their leader and chief coordinator is as far removed from a Sydney Greenstreet type as could be imagined: the little sage-like ex-convict "Doc" Riedenschneider (veteran Sam Jaffe), newly released but with a wily, careful plan for stealing diamonds with the right men, his mantra being that "crime is a form of left-handed endeavour." His chief soldier in the operation is Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley, a tough guy but with his heart in the right place, who has never had the lucky breaks. Further down the league table of dishonourable mention in this gang come Anthony Mancuso, James Whitmore, Marc Lawrence, and Louis Calhern as the slimy distinguished lawyer Alonzo Emmerich financing the operation, his chief weakness being his 'niece' Angela Phinlay, played in hauntingly sensual fashion by the one and only Marilyn Monroe, whom Huston shrewdly cast in her first major dramatic role.

Also just as haunting though less glamorous of course than Marilyn, is "Doll", Dix's girlfriend, poignantly unable to control her eyelashes under the tears of personal strife (another brilliant character touch by Huston), and played by the excellent character star Jean Hagen, later to gain cinematic immortality as the squeaky-voiced silent movie star of Singin' in the Rain.

The law enforcement as such in this caper - what would be considered in old Hollywood as the necessary moral backbone - is pretty much in the sidelines.  As the persevering crooks go their separate ways however, and the ensuing, almost inevitable double crossing starts, the Law gradually closes in on them, and the world-weary police chief (John McIntire), has the perfect riposte, as he switches on the various police radios that are constantly in operation around the city:

"We send police assistance to every one of those calls, cos they're not just code numbers on a radio beam, they're cries for help! People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped! That goes on 24 hours of the day, every day in the year, and that's not exceptional, that's usual, it's the same in every city of the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad? Suppose we had...[turns off the radios]...just silence? Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished, the jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over. Think about it."