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A bumbling error at the Ministry Of Education results in Nutbourne Boys School having to share with St Swithin's School For Girls. This bemuses the respective head teachers of each school and leads to all manner of chaotic goings on, however the two are forced to come to an uneasy alliance in the hope of averting major trouble.

The Happiest Days Of Your Life is based on the John Dighton play from 1948, with Dighton writing the part of Headmistress Whitchurch specifically for Margaret Rutherford. Replacing George Howe from the play in the role of Headmaster Pond, is Alastair Sim, and herein lies the crowning glory of this filmic adaptation, Sim & Rutherford are perfectly wonderful, bouncing off each other to keep what is basically a one joke movie, highly entertaining. Directed by the gifted Frank Launder, and produced by the equally adroit Sidney Gilliat, The Happiest Days Of Your Life is a quintessentially British movie, obviously a precursor to the St Trinians franchise, the film entertains the children with it's high jinks clash of the sexes heart, whilst tickling the watching adults with its very saucy undercurrent. Thankfully the chaotic ending cements all that has gone before it to leave this particular viewer with a grin as wide as Nutbourne Rail Station. Great fun. 8/10

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.

A boy's school receives some very unwelcome visitors

Starring Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford

Screenplay by Frank Launder and John Dighton

Directed by Frank Launder

For an old movie this is a fun runaround.

It's short and witty and a great way to pass just over an hour of your time. It's silly and easy to watch and passes really quickly so that says something about it.

If you fancy a laugh without too much of a plot headache, give it a shot.

7.5/10

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.

This British comedy has a sterling cast of English comedy actors of the day. Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford square off in a delightful match of wits and wiles as the head masters of a boys' school and a girls' school, respectively. He runs Nutbourne College and she is head mistress of St. Swithin's. When the two groups are brought together by error of England's education ministry, mayhem breaks out. Wetherby Pond and Muriel Whitchurch craftily try to make things work out during concurrent visits of contingents of the girls' parents and the governing board of the boy's school. But it's too much to think their deception of boys and girls switching classrooms, the playing field, and the dorms will be able to last.

Several other actors add to the humor. Richard Wattis plays Arnold Billings, Guy Middleton is Victor Hyde-Brown, and Edward Rigby is Rainbow, the boys' school maintenance and property man. Among those on the women's side, from the girls' school, are Joyce Grenfell as Miss Gossage and Muriel Aked as Miss Jezzard.

This is a good comedy that could have been even better with more witty and funny dialog. It's based on a 1947 play of the same title. From the stage to film, the writers probably added more action in place of dialog for the comedy of the pandemonium at the school. So, the humor is mostly in the antics that occur with mad-cap shuffling among the groups - teachers as well as students.

Of course, Sim and Rutherford are a delight and entertaining in any film they are in - and having them together here is enough to bring smiles several times. Here are some favorite lines in the film.

Muriel Whitchurch, "Come now, Angela, you've made porridge before." Angela Parry, "Yes, but no one had to eat it." Muriel Whitchurch, "That's a defeatist attitude, dear."

Mrs. Hampstead, "There's a lady at the door, sir, wanting to know if you'll vote for Miss Weston in the election." Wetherby Pond, "Mrs. Hampstead, you can tell your lady that if there's a male candidate, whether he's conservative, socialist, communist or anarchist - or, for that matter, liberal, he will have my vote." Mrs. Hampstead, "That's what I thought, sir."

Sir Angus McNally, "We're waiting for an explanation, Mr. Pond." Wetherby Pond, "Can't you see I'm trying to think of one?"

Dr. Collet, "La Crosse?" Wetherby Pond, "La double-cross."

Muriel Whitchurch, "I have a brother who grows groundnuts in Tanganyika. He writes there's a splendid opportunity for education among the natives." Wetherby Pond, "Oh, madame, I.. I'm in the mood for any suggestion."

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.

"Wetherby Pond" (Alastair Sim) is the headmaster of a boy's school who really just wants a peaceable life with his miscreant pupils at "Nutbourne" school. It's the war, though, and the useless mandarins at Whitehall decide that he is going to have to share his premises with another school. Thing is, they get all caught up in their own red tape and next thing he finds the intimidating "Miss Whitchurch" on his doorstep, armed with hundreds of girls, luggage, hockey sticks - you name it. They are there and there to stay. Before he can blink, "Pond" and his staff have been outmanoeuvred and his shirts are now in the filing cabinet! A sort of truce breaks out, cemented a little more when they realise that their charges have pens and paper and stamps. Letters to the parents about sharing send shivers down their spines. They must collaborate. A sudden inspection spells disaster for both of their careers unless they can institute some facility sharing legerdemain in double quick time. Will it work? Can it? Well we spend much of the rest of this amiable comedy demonstrating a degree of precision the would have made the D-Day landings blush. Sim and Rutherford both had super comedy timing and Frank Launder and John Dighton have adapted the latter man's play to ensure they get ample opportunity to demonstrate that to us. A solid supporting cast including the always entertaining Joyce Grenfell help keep this eighty minutes of mischief and mayhem working well.

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.

The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) : Brief Review -

A school-based chaos that teaches you how a smart comedy of colliding situations can be written for ages to study. Frank Launder has made a film based on a play of the same name by John Dighton to show us how a smart comedy can be choreographed with genuine conflicts. Two people's acts collide with each other, but as they say, "opposite attracts," they two find a solution to solve their problems through these collisions. St. Swithin's Girls' School is accidentally billeted at Nutbourne College, a boys' school in Hampshire. The heads of both schools try to keep a balance and carry on for a week against all odds (funny odds, I must add here). One day, the lady head has some parents visiting the school, for which the boys need to disappear. They have it all planned to help each other-a sort of blackmail-but then the boys school's head also has some important visitors on the same day. Afraid of getting exposed and losing everything they have, the two join forces and stage a schedule that has to run exactly according to the clock so that they both can manage their visitors. But is it that simple when you have 117 boys, 100 girls, and almost 20-25 staff members on the same premises? It sounds impossible, even when you read it here. Then just imagine how they must have written it and brought it to the screen. Usually, we hate chaos, but some comedies have made us love it, and The Happiest Days of Your Life is one of them. It surely gives us some of the happiest moments of a school-based comedy. Alastair Sim is flawless yet again, and supporting him, Margaret Rutherford, is equally great. There is a big bunch of supporting cast along with more than a hundred child artists who have seemed to fit the role despite blink-and-miss shots in this heavy rush school ride. The laughs aren't hysterical, but they are genuinely funny and very cleverly written. Frank Launder has made things so easy when you know it was a difficult job to handle this script with so many artists on the field.

RATING - 7/10*

By - #samthebestest.

This English classic couldn't miss with Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford in the same movie (he's the head of a boys' school who has to accomodate her school and staff during wartime alongside their own). There's also the delightfully dotty Joyce Grenfell (Miss Gossage, 'call me sausage'). The Happiest Days ... falls back on slapstick farce and, rather like the St Trinian's series, sends up the whole boarding school culture with glee. It all gets incredibly silly and, as such, is a genuinely hilarious and harmless hour and a half of entertainment.

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.

Somehow, in a lifetime in which I estimate having seen over 25,000 films (starting about 72 years back), I had totally missed "The Happiest Days of Your Life". I can be counted upon to rave about a film I like, but rarely go off the deep end over such things. Not until now, anyway. If this isn't the absolutely funniest movie I have ever seen in my life, I can't recall what is. Of course, there are different comedy genres, from French Farce to British Droll, from The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello to "Some Like It Hot" and "Tom Jones", possibly ending up with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. But of the kind which relies on sparkling, witty, and cutting dialog delivered by masters (especially British masters), this one has no equal. I live alone, and do not laugh out loud all that often when viewing comedy of any kind, but at 3am this morning, my neighbors could probably have heard me a dozen times laughing right through the walls; this film is just that funny. The slapstick elements that commence about three-quarters of the way through are in themselves hilarious, but the first quarter of the film, given over to the male masters of an all-boys school, is like nothing I have ever seen or heard before, and the actors delivering this scintillating portion of the dialog - Alastair Sim, Richard Wattis, Guy Middleon and Edward Rigby, in particular - are irreplaceable in all of their individual splendor of delivery. When Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell and others from the distaff side of the proceedings arrive to place their unwelcome mark on what had been a pretty much all-male environment, the dialog and humor remain impeccably delightful (and British; God almighty, it is all so wonderfully British!), but increasing comedic physicality becomes the order of the day. Indeed, the confrontation scenes between Sim and Rutherford - and there are many, constituting the middle portion of the film - are so powerfully comedic that the lines and rejoinders attain an almost corporeal physicality. I've never seen anything of this type so perfectly done on the screen, and the entire 75 or 80 minutes of verbal and physical mayhem are so overwhelmingly delightful that, as one other commentator remarked, I could easily have done with another half-hour of it incorporated into the glorious whole of the film. Anyway, as far as my memory serves right now, from a dialog and one-liner standpoint, this is surely the funniest movie I can recall having seen. I will watch it again tonight and on many subsequent nights, since I have 68 years of catching up to do

One of the flat-out drollest movies of all-time. Sim and Rutherford are at their best matching wits over the predicament of an all-boys and all-girls school sharing the same quarters. Slapstick has never been this sophisticated.

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!

Based on a stage play and very popular when released. This now looks tame, silly, slap dash and not very funny.

The Happiest Days of Your Life is set in 1949 when St Swithin's Girls' School is accidentally billeted at Nutbourne College which is a boys' school.

The head of the boys school is Wetherby Pond (Alastair Sim) which is failing. The teachers there are rather lax and Pond plans to call it a day and head for new pastures. The staff are perturbed when the head of the girl's school Muriel Whitchurch (Margaret Rutherford) arrives with her pupils and teachers.

The arrival of the girls causes chaos as they do not have enough facilities such as dormitory beds for everyone. The staff and heads of the respective schools vie to get the best resources first.

Matters come to a head when a some school governors arrive to look at the boy's school and the parents of the pupils arrive to look at the girl's school.

Pond and Whitchurch have to work together that they can fool everyone that it is a single sex school.

This farce might had worked on stage and it might had been rip roaringly funny back in 1950. It certainly does not stand up well now. Sim, Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell and George Cole are good as ever and it does look like a prototype St Trinian's film.

The play is cleverly constructed - begin with the porter, Rainbow - & let the audience see the background unfold through his eyes. The film follows the play with great faithfulness, working, no doubt, on the simple premise that it couldn't be bettered. Now throw in a host of superb character actors - & the result is a resounding triumph.A definite must-see.

Had heard a lot of great things about 'The Happiest Days of Your Life' from family friends and trusted critic reviews. The idea, of an all-boys and all-girls uniting as one, sounded like it would be really entertaining and having two acting greats in Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford (both joys to watch in pretty much everything they're in, have seldom known them to be any less than bright spots) in the same film proved very difficult to resist.

Watching it, 'The Happiest Days of Your Life' proved to be every bit as great as hoped and more. Actually one of the best and funniest films seen recently (school culture and life has seldom being more observantly, slyly, charmingly or hilariously depicted), and as over the top as it sounds to some that is not an exaggeration. Of my recent viewings, there has been a mix of brilliant, great, very good, good, decent, average, mediocre and terrible (so basically hit and miss), 'The Happiest Days of Your Life' really stood out and in a brilliant way. It deserves every ounce of the praise given to it, yet to me it is actually deserving to be given more credit and exposure.

Both Sim and Rutherford are on top form, with comic timing so expertly and knowing that most would only wish of having. Rutherford especially is superb and shares a dream of a chemistry with Sim, as they bounce off each other in a way that is never less than edge-of-the-seat riveting. They and their chemistry are what makes this film and one does wish that they were in more films together. That does not mean that the rest of the cast should be overlooked, because Joyce Grenfell is particularly splendidly dotty and the support from Guy Middleton and Richard Wattis sparkles.

Also sparkling is one of the wittiest, most beautifully structured and funniest scripts in the history of British comedy from personal opinion, one chock-full of sophistication and hilarious lines that the laughter is practically non-stop and not once does it feel stale or lose momentum. On top of being that entertaining, the increasingly frenetic antics never become confusing or overplayed, things may get a little chaotic at the end but that was clearly the intent and it was fun to watch.

The story is slight and simple but there is not an air of contrivance or over-predictability, and everything feels cohesive. It's directed with verve and class by Frank Launder, it moves at a lively pace meaning that the short length doesn't ever feel long and it's pleasing visually without being stage-bound.

Overall, a wonderful film that made me happy. As one can guess the main reasons to watch it are Sim, Rutherford and the script. 10/10 Bethany Cox