The Pure Hell of St. Trinian's

When the school is burnt to the ground, all the girls find themselves in the dock. However the judge decides mercy and takes up the offer of one Professor Canford to open a new school with a backer and try to change the girls. The backer, Alphonse O'Reilly, takes the whole school on a trip to Europe, but Flash Harry finds that the ship is actually on it's way to Africa, where Alphonse plans to sell the older girls into harems!

This entry in the series starts really well. Not only does it have what I consider to be a great line (`there's always trouble when there's arson around') but the courtroom stuff is very funny. The rest of the film from there starts to tail off, the continuation of the film sees the old characters come back in (mostly) are this is good. However once the action moves to Africa etc it all becomes a little silly but doesn't manage to be fun for it.

The action gets more frantic and less amusing as it goes along and, by the end of the whole thing, I'd pretty much lost interest in it. The cast are reasonably good. The girls are in two camps – the young thugs and the sexy `girls' (albeit it they are happily in their 20's). The support cast includes good performances from George Cole (complete with cheeky chappy music in case you didn't get it). Parker and Grenfell are OK but their stuff on the island doesn't really wash. Barker and Walters are fine, as is a cameo from Le Mesurier, but Sid James is pretty wasted.

Overall this is worth seeing if you like the series (although it fades throughout the 90 minutes), but there are better films in the series if you're just coming in now.

This is the final of the three original St. Trinian's films. Alastair Sim doesn't appear in this one, which leaves quite a space but is filled well by new characters and extensions of existing ones. The plot is a lot different from the 2 before, in that it's more surreal. In the other 2, the fact that Flash Harry, a police woman and a professor would become stranded on a desert island wouldn't have happened. Neither would the storming of an Arab sheiks palace. The charceters of Sergeant Ruby Gates (Joyce Grenfell) and Flash Harry (George Cole) are explored much more, with us learning things like Harry's middle name and where Ruby's mother lives. Fantastic performances form the whole cast but I think Cole and Grenfell steal the show. Comedy at its best. Watch out for the scene in the strippers club. Watch Harry's face. Probably the best comedy without words ever.

The Pure Hell Of St Trinian's, the third movie in the series, never approaches the comic heights of the first two. Part of this is down to the absence of Alistair Sim, but also it is due to a script that switches the emphasis largely away from the school and places it more on the men from the Ministry Of Education. For long stretches you can hardly spot a schoolgirl, while the movie lacks a strong comic climax.

You can also see a lack of inspiration at work here, as the Grenfell-Parker `romance' is more or less a replay of (the better handled) relationship with Terry-Thomas in the previous movie, while the whole 'desert island' business seems designed to fill up the movie's running-time.

If it's not as fun as `Belles' or `Blue Murder', `Pure Hell' does have its good points. Cecil Parker's down-at-heel headmaster is a major asset to the movie, while it's nice to see the likes of Sid James, Denis Price and Liz Frazer make an appearance.

The comic high-points come early in the movie, with Raymond Huntley stealing the movie as a Judge distracted by the charms of a leggy Sixth-Former, while later the 'striptease' Hamlet provides the film's most memorable moment. Irene Handle is also on top form as a more than slightly batty teacher.

It's not the best of the series by a long way, but forty or so years on it is still worth watching.

I just watched this on TV, and it was great to see so many well known actors looking young ! This film is very interesting as a part of our British cultural heritage, and a window on a time when Pythonesque humour was developing.

The idea of a British schoolgirl being a stripper in a club called "Mohammed's" in "Arabia" may seem awfully non-PC today, but the other characters are also caricatures of British types.

I particularly enjoyed the British Officer in the "Bath" unit and his preoccupation with Scotch. But as another reviewer has said, George Cole is outstanding.

Great fun.

Third time the charm? Well, not really. This installment in the original and classic St. Trinian's films doesn't actually take place at St. Trinian's at all! The school is a pile of embers at the top of the first reel! Gone, too, is Alistair Sim (everyone's favorite Scrooge) in the drag double role as headmistress and her brother. The up side is this allows more shenanigans from the likes of Joyce Grenfell (a personal favorite) and the supporting cast. But with school girls of St. Trins only set decoration, it's just not the same. There's a remake of the original that's also spawned two sequels (Rupert Everett subs for Sim) but these are inferior goods - stick to the glorious black and white originals!