The choice is between:
The Ladykillers (1955), starring Alec Guinness as the "brain" of a crime gang. An elaborate scheme of robbery relies on the unwitting co-operation of an old lady, and goes wrong when she realises what has happened. The film was remade in 2004, with an American setting, as a vehicle for Tom Hanks.
The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), a film inspired by the cartoons of Ronald Searle, a former prisoner of war of the Japanese, who took to drawing pictures of schoolgirls inflicting gruesome tortures on one another and on hapless bystanders. The cartoons are now available in a Penguin Modern Classics edition.
Both films are black comedies (The Ladykillers rather blacker than St Trinian's), and both play on the collision of "old school" values (in the one case Edwardian social manners, in the other the "free school" educationalism of the 1920s) and the acquisitive ethos of the austerity years. In this regard, the crucial line of dialogue from The Belles of St Trinian's, in the following clip, is 9 minutes in:
Clarence, when poor Frieda and I started this school during the General Strike of 1926, we vowed to make it the happiest care-free establishment in the whole of Britain, and what a gay arcadia of happy girlhood it was then, until the war broke out, and such things as good manners and good taste were replaced by your black market values.
No comments:
Post a Comment