Tom Brown étudiant

Sir Cedric Hardwick is superb as Doctor Arnold.

It is hard to over-estimate the importance of this headmaster in the history of education. Singlehanded, he revolutionised not only school discipline but also curriculum in one of England's oldest and most famous Public Schools. From Rugby the reforms spread out to Eton, to Harrow and to Winchester. The ideologies were carried by students of these colleges to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and out into the world.

To our modern eyes, the notion of a master whipping a student with a birch for fighting and expelling a boy for telling a lie seems a bit extreme. But prior to Dr Arnold, punishments were brutal and were administered in an arbitrary manner by each teacher. Boys were exploited by the masters, and junior boys were exploited by the seniors.

Hardwick's portrayal of Arnold as a dour, devout and almost obsessively righteous man is wonderful. Arnold hates bullying, but more than anything, he hates lies. Lies, to Arnold, are the mark of real cowardice. Where there are lies, there is Sin and Corruption. A boy that lied to Arnold was immediately expelled.

There is an aspect of Dr Arnold's reformation that is only hinted at- It was he who brought modern subjects such as History and Geography to the school syllabus, to stand alongside the Classic as valuable learning.

Jimmy Lydon is wonderful as Tom. His emotions, be they glee, grief, pain or loneliness are expressed in an irrepressible manner by this lovely boy with his mobile face and eager expression.

Since this was made, there have been some other very good movie versions of the story, but this adaptation of "Tom Brown's School Days" is still worth seeing. It has a good cast and good atmosphere, with effective story-telling by Robert Stevenson.

Cedric Hardwicke is well cast as the stern headmaster Arnold, and the three most important young characters also work well. Jimmy Lydon as Tom, Freddie Bartholomew as his friend and rival East, and Billy Halop as the bully Flashman all give good performances.

The boarding school setting is also done effectively, and it works both in creating the right atmosphere and as a period setting. There are times when it pulls you right into the world of the young characters, a world in which they are their own masters in many ways. Their boyish loyalties, threats, fears, rivalries, and misunderstandings all come across believably.

On a broader level, it also succeeds in establishing the tension between the adult's (i.e. the headmaster's) goals and the students' goals. Some of the more recent versions have probably done an even better job of communicating the themes while also making the story entertaining, but this one does a solid job as well, and it deserves also to be remembered.

Jimmy Lydon plays the title character, but the point of view occasionally cuts away to Cedric Hardwicke as the radical and revered Thomas Arnold. Judging by this movie, his great innovation was to cast out liars and talk the Sixth Form into badmouthing bullying.

Even so, the performances are fine in a Code-compliant manner, with a solid juvenile cast including Freddy Bartholomew and Gale Storm in her feature debut. It's also director Robert Stevenson's first American movie. He would stay for the rest of his career and by the early 1970s would become the most successful movie director ever, if you went by unadjusted-for-inflation grosses of all his movies. He was not an auteur. He gave the producer and, it turned out, the audience what it wanted. At this point, he was becoming the go-to director for Ye Olde England movies. Like many a director, he retreated to TV in the early 1950s, but hooked up with Walt Disney in the latter half of the decade, and directed many of his gimmick live-action comedies.

This work is primarily occupied with the major incidents in the life of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, and his overcoming of a good deal of resistance in lifting that institution from a tepid state to a position of England's finest public school. The strong direction is by Robert Stevenson, who also contributed mightily to the script, which is rather faithfully based upon the novel of the same name by Thomas Hughes, and which employs the student Tom Brown as Arnold's tactical and ethical surrogate within the scholastic body. Arnold, who must find an answer to the prevalent bullying of the day, is portrayed by Sir Cedric Hardwicke with a stunning performance, ably supported by Josephine Hutchinson as Mrs. Arnold. The film proceeds at a very crisp pace, with the scenario building well as Brown, played with feeling by Jimmy Lydon, prepares to make a stand against older and tyrannical students led by Billy Halop as Flashman. The arteries of the novel are presented with some depth, demonstrating the inculcation into the students of the importance of physical and mental courage, loyalty, and self-reliance, albeit apparently at the cost of some amount of intellectual achievement. The love of the students for Rugby and for their headmaster is presented throughout, the production design, costumes, and editing are all first-rate, and a superb musical score is contributed by Anthony Collins.

Whilst I thought that Cedric Hardwick gave an excellent performance as the headmaster, I thought that the performance of Robert Newton was better