School for Secrets

My local TV guide gave me high expectations for this movie ... but alas I was disappointed. It's not that the acting is bad. With Ralph Richardson in the lead how could it be? Nor is the subject matter uninteresting. However "School for Secrets" is poorly constructed. It piles scene on scene, without building up to a proper climax. It has too many main characters - and most of them are written as semi-humorous stereotypes. One day someone will make the definitive movie about the development of radar during World War II, but this isn't it.

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.

This film, about how "boffins" contributed to the English war effort (by inventing airborne radar and other technological miracles), was made to help everyone cheer up and keep that upper lip stiff during the hard post-war recovery years.

The real delight in watching it from 50 years distance is in the acting, writing and direction. We have grown used to seeing the likes of Richardson, Huntley, Hordern, Attenborough, Laurie et al in "feature" roles (nay, on display as museum exhibits). Most of them are now gone, but when this film was made--at the hand of the incomparable Peter Ustinov--they were in their prime and they were playing main characters. It is a little like the days "when gods walked the earth".

The delight in this film is not in the plot (although it is a sobering reminder of just how much technology has moved this century) but in the language of the Ustinov script and in the effortless way that the principals go about their craft. I doubt that any of the four knighthoods given to director and cast were for this film, but one can see in it film why they achieved this recognition in the end.

"School for Secrets" remains, as I am sure it was always intended to be, a "jolly fine" cheer-up story.

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

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.