The Happiest Days of Your Life

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.