The Happiest Days of Your Life

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.

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.

After a long run in the West End this charming film re-cast Margaret Rutherford as the Headmistress 'Miss Whitchurch' in this financially successful adaptation made in 1950.

All interior shots took place at Riverside studios in Hammersmith, London. The exterior scenes were filmed on location at a public girl's school near Liss in Hampshire. During the 12 - week shoot both Margaret Rutherford and Joyce Grenfell were staying in a hotel nearby and would often visit the school during the evenings where they would happily enjoy the company of the real school mistresses.

Although the film's script contains only two original lines from the original play the leads and supporting actors are in fine form and you can only feel sympathetic for their predicament especially in the final scenes.

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.

THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE is redolent of an era of 'make do and mend,' when everyone in Britain had to endure the privations of education on a shoestring. Based on a stage success, Frank Launder's film boasts two towering central performances by Alistair Sim and Margaret Rutherford as the head teachers of the boys' and girls' schools forced to share accommodation. The two actors have a field day, using their full range of facial expressions to create characters who, although harassed, can make the best of an almost impossible situation. The supporting cast contains some memorable cameos, notably Joyce Grenfell as Miss Gossage ("you can call me sausage"), Richard Wattis as a harassed teacher (no one could do harassed like Wattis), and Guy Rolfe as a slimy boys' school teacher with an eye for young women. The film zips along at breakneck speed, especially at the end, when the two head teachers try their best to convince some visitors that everything in their school is perfectly normal. THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE is only seventy-five minutes long, but is nonetheless packed with incident and humor. Definitely worth a look if you're feeling low.