Tom Brown's Schooldays

Comparisons with 'Goodbye, Mr Chips', 'The Winslow Boy' and 'The Browning Version' are inevitable, but this film just hasn't quite got the chops to compete. It's fascinating as a pseudo-historical record of public school life in the mid-19th Century, but the story fails to engage fully. However, it's an innocent enough way to pass the time without boring you rigid. Damned with faint praise.

'Tom Brown's School Days', one of the best depictions of schoolboy life in literature, was previously adapted in 1940. While not the truest to the source material either, that was also a good film, especially for Cedric Hardwicke's performance, and it is hard to say which is the better one out of that and this film.

1951's adaptation is not perfect. The direction is a bit staid and lacklustre, Robert Stevenson in the 1940 film directed with more sympathy, energy and style to me, here the direction is not bad, just that it could have been more.

The story is sometimes a little too episodically told, and while it's well paced on the whole there are occasions where it sags. John Howard Davies is more age appropriate than Jimmy Lydon and has cuteness and charm, but is also a little too delicate and wistful in the title role, which due to being the main focus is more interestingly written, the earlier version focusing more on Arnold.

However, 'Tom Brown's School Days' looks great, beautifully shot and the period setting is suitably atmospheric and quaint. Richard Adinsell's score complements well and has the right amount of jauntiness and whimsy as well as stirring atmosphere. The script is very thought-provoking, with some nice charming, humorous and poignant moments, and much of the story is charming and lively, with Arnold's strictness and progressiveness and Flashman's very vindictive bullying (to the point of being reprehensible, have to agree that one cannot feel sympathy for him as a result) very well-realised.

Particularly notable here in 'Tom Brown's School Days' is the acting. A more restrained than usual Robert Newton gives an authoritative and very sincere performance as strict but saintly Arnold, while John Clarlesworth is appealing as East and John Forrest comes very close to stealing the show making for a viciously snobbish and quite intimidating bully in Flashman. Supporting turns are splendid, though some are brief.

Overall, solid film with the acting being especially noteworthy. 7/10 Bethany Cox

I caught this years ago on a classic movie station and I thought it might be another hopelessly dated "classic" movie. Classic in the sense that just because it's old it's good. When, more often than not, that is obviously not the friggin' case, Jack.

But this was a rousing fun tale of a young British dude and his trials and tribulations at a English boarding school. It's all about the revolution/revenge (good hearted arse kicking revenge, mind you) Tom Brown and the other underclassmen take on the bullying upperclass dudes.

The scene that got me most was the "roasting" scene. It involves the main character, the bad guy, and a turn of the century fireplace, what happens, well...you'll have to see the flick to find out. For an older movie it's a pretty brutal, wincing scene. Hooray for the revolution!

The film appears to show people who felt they knew what right was and who acted in harmony with that inner conviction , right as the bible describes it to be for the school headmaster reads the parable of seed from the bible and otherwise quotes from it, and appears to be a living example of its precepts in his comportment. His reasonableness is most winsome especially in the scene where he rebukes the younger teacher for lack of respect toward the older teachers, notwithstanding the fact that he agrees with the younger teachers argument, he nonetheless criticises the way he presented it. The compelling invisible force that made people believe that they knew the right they felt was....was ..right and the subsequent belief that good would eventually triumph over bad, evil, naughtiness call it what you like, is undeniable in this film, and if Flashman is symbolic of the axis of evil, then maybe expulsion of them is mankinds only hope. Who will do the expelling? Who decides what is right? Evil? I love films that get you thinking!

On one level this is a rollicking tale of life in an English Public School (other nationals may need to remember to read "Private" for "Public" here.) during the reign of King William IV in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a well acted and well directed film that most people would find enjoyable to watch, but because of the specialised and unfamiliar scenario it is unlikely to attract audiences from outside those who themselves attended similar schools or those with some form of interest in the history of education.

At a slightly deeper level we must recognise that this film is essentially a remake of a film with a very similar title (Tom Brown's School Days rather than Tom Brown's Schooldays) released ten years earlier. Both films featured Rugby school under the headmastership of the famous educationalist Thomas Arnold - a part played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke in the earlier film and by Robert Newton in this remake - and both were based on the book of the same name written by Thomas Hughes in 1857. It is very hard to discuss one of these films without referring to the other, and since there is no point in duplicating comments on this IMDb database I would recommend anyone reading this page who is sufficiently interested to refer also to my comments on the earlier film. This second version of the story is much more melodramatic than the previous one, but is less in keeping with the original book, and I feel that it probably reflects life as it was in Rugby school at the time less accurately. The climax of the book is Arnold expelling the school bully Flashman for breaching the school moral code. This later film is slightly longer than its predecessor and in it Flashman's behaviour is shown as so reprehensible that the viewer can have no sympathy for him, whereas in the book and the earlier film Flashman is simply a typical bully who is caught out for lying. This is important because it causes the viewer to reflect on the magnitude of the task of creating a school code of conduct strict enough to justify this expulsion. For these reasons, whilst I can watch and enjoy both these films almost equally, I regard the 1940 film as the better, and as more worthy of repeat viewing. For the IMDb database I have also rated it slightly higher than the present one (six out of ten rather than five out of ten).