School for Secrets

I was a Junior Scientific Officer at TRE Malvern and lent my Wellington aircraft to the film makers to show 'window' deployment. I recall seeing a clip of this activity in 1946, whether in a cinema or at TRE theatre I cannot recall. The DVD does not show it. The DVD is factually incorrect,the acting dreadful and the plot frequently chronologically incorrect. Life at TRE was nothing like that portrayed and the love story sloppy in the extreme The operator in the Bruneval Raid was Flight Sergeant Cox, the only person dressed in RAF uniform. Probably as some colonel in a plush office whose nearest to the war was the golf course or polo ground saying that'We can't have an RAF chap in army uniform eh what' It was this raid which caused the overnight exodus from Worth to Malvern College for fear of reprisals. R.B-K

A very nice bit of post war propaganda showing how our technological advantage helped to win the war, without this secret advantage the war may have been lost, the boffins contributed a lot to the victory. It was superior technology that won the war of the Atlantic against the U-Boats.

Mostly posh people playing the boffins as is usually the case with a great script with lots of witty lines.

A great cast who played their parts very well. Very well worth watching and currently being shown on TPTV in the UK. No slow bits that leads to the viewer losing interest and giving up watching it to the end.

Ralph Richardson is a well-known herpetologist among people who know who's who in herpetology. He's also an electronics engineer and attached to the unit developing radar for the RAF.

You could put Ralph Richardson in anything, and I would praise it to the skies. Saying he's perfectly cast as the understated boffin who tackles whatever is thrown at him in a self-deprecating manner, whether it's turning down an opportunity to join the Home Guard because he's too busy or parachuting into German territory to take apart a prototype of the German efforts at radar, he's always highy watchable and believable. In this movie, he's got quite a cast with him under the scripting and direction of Peter Ustinov: John Laurie, Finlay Currie and Raymond Huntley among the boffins, David Tomlinson and Richard Attenborough among the fliers. Ann Wilton and Peggy Evans are among the women who get a few lines, but it's a bit of "men must fight and women must weep" movie for them. Still, even Finlay Currie barely seems in the movie, when compared with Richardson, which is all right with me.

Don't watch this film if you are looking for technical details on radar development, as one 'boffin' reviewer has done. This was written and acted as entertainment, not an educational film, and as such it succeeds. Never seen it before this afternoon, but thoroughly enjoyed watching some of our finest actors from that period, with witty banter that was typical of that era. Recommended as a reminder that we still had a sense of humour, despite the recent end to WWII.

I'm not certain that the Brits were quite ready to reveal their secrets (like high-tech radar or "windows") even in 1946 because so much of this film is made of chit chat about uniforms and interloping schoolmasters. I learned something about the stresses involved but little about the shadier side of the work.

The talkiness is somewhat relieved towards the end when the film takes us on bombing missions over Europe, following a boffin or a doughty RAF man like Richard Attenborough. Pretty daring, actually, those scenes of flight.

But the Brits were on the brink of making some of the finest films about World War II that ever appeared on screen, "The Cruel Sea," for instance. And this one looks a little pallid.