Tom Brown's Schooldays

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Trailer—Tom Brown's Schooldays

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.

i saw this film thanks to talking pictures , i love the bit when tom arrives back home for his holidays and says to his mother rugby is a wonderful school after he had been hit on his feet with a stick , nearly burnt alive , pelted with food , dropped up and down on the floor and endured endless tedious lessons , i expect when he was in church praying he was asking our good lord to get him out of this hell hole

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!

To my surprise, this version is every bit as gripping and fascinating as the 1940 RKO version. Some leading critics in fact actually prefer this movie. You can count the New York Times for one. True, Gordon Parry's direction rarely rises above a very competent level, but Noel Langley's screenplay is, to say the least, brilliant. He has expanded the story slightly to make the Flashman incidents more believable to those unaccustomed to the ways of the British Public School system in the 1850s -- and indeed right up to the 1950's! What's more, the movie is attractively acted, particularly by young John Howard Davies as Tom Brown and charismatic Robert Newton, perfectly cast as Doctor Thomas Arnold. (In fact, Newton told me that he regarded this as by far his best performance. I agree!). What's more, the movie has not only been extremely well produced on a really top budget, but features a fine music score by Richard Addinsell.

Though this film rates a nine out of ten for Robert Newton, which is the main reason to see it, overall it only deserves the six I have given it. Newton made this more or less back to back with Sergeants Three a ho hum adaptation of the Kipling story and there is no comparison in terms of performance. Although a very underrated actor with a large range he rarely got to portray sympathetic characters on screen and this performance as Dr. Arnold the Reforming headmaster of Rugby School is on a par with his Frank Gibbons in Noel Coward's This Happy Breed - and as Coward wrote the part for himself and played it on stage this is saying something. Apart from Newton's standout performance the film is little more than a 'Saturday Morning' picture but passes the time.