Film Review
With
Carry On Sergeant (1958) and
Carry On
Nurse (1959) both proving to be a major success at the British
box office, producer Peter Rogers must have felt he had struck a
goldmine and he wasted no time delivering more of the same, beginning with
Carry On Teacher.
Like the two films that preceded it,
Teacher is a gentle send-up of a bulwark
of British society (this time state education) and is a far more sedate kind of film than we now associate with the
Carry On team. Mindful of its family audience,
it relies mostly on slapstick and wordplay for its humour, with none of the
crude innuendo and double entendre which would tend to predominate in later
years. The film seems to be continuing a tradition of raucous but innocent
British comedies set in the classroom - from Will Hay's
Boys
Will Be Boys (1935) to Frank Launder's
The
Belles of St. Trinian's (1954). Joan Sims splitting her
shorts is about as rauchy as the film gets.
Screenwriter Norman Hudis was a superb gag merchant but not the most imaginative
of writers - the plot is mostly a rehash of
Carry On Sergeant (and
would later be recycled for
Carry
On Cruising). The main difference is the change in location
from an army camp to a typical London high school (the actual school used
for the exteriors was Drayton Secondary School in West Ealing). Whilst its
characterisation of teachers and school children is a tad simplistic (the
teachers are all eccentrics, the pupils good-natured anarchists),
Carry on Teacher is spot on with its lampooning of the
crackpot theories that were being put forward by child psychologists at the
time, notions which threatened a teacher's ability to maintain discipline
in the classroom. (It can be argued that the crackpots, aided by overly
liberal politicians, have won the day, and in doing so have made teaching
a far less attractive profession than it once was.)
It may be a fairly minor entry in the
Carry On series,
but this one benefits from having more convincingly drawn characters, all
played to perfection by our happy band of comic performers. Kenneth Connor
turns in one of the best performances of his career, for once playing a character
who genuinely arouses our sympathy as the man willing to sacrifice his happy
bachelorhood for three shiny new science labs. Hattie Jacques makes
a wonderfully tyrannical schoolmistress, of the kind who might well have
enjoyed a previous life as a storm trooper (or Attila the Hun). Even
Kenneth Williams manages to put on one side his customary camp excesses and
instead he turns in a pukka character performance, playing brilliantly off
Charles Hawtrey's maniacal music master (the original Mr Bean) as they wreak
more havoc on Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet than the Wehrmacht inflicted
on the whole of Europe during the Second World War. 'Play with your dagger!'
Williams screams in desperation to the dumbfounded Chorus as Hawtrey's
nightmarish overture drags on for what seems like three centuries.
The part that would by default have gone to Sid James several Carry Ons down
the line was given to Ted Ray, one of the most popular comedy performers
in Britain at the time, famous for his Sunday lunchtime radio show
Ray's
a Laugh. Ray's sympathetic portrayal of a humane (acting) headmaster
loath to use the cane even when his dream of promotion is put in jeopardy
helps to make this one of the more heart-warming of the Carry Ons. And
of course we mustn't overlook the talented trio lifted from
Carry On Nurse
- Joan Sims, Leslie Phillips and Rosalind Knight, all a delight to watch,
with Phillips getting to repeat his famous line 'ding dong'. Playing
the chief 'saboteur' is a prolific child actor, Richard O'Sullivan, who would
become a fixture on British television in the 1970s in such shows as
Man About the House.
Carry on Teacher may not be what we now expect from
the
Carry On team, but it was another notable success
when it was first released, ensuring the series still had many more years
left to run. Of course, the best was yet to come, and with Sid James
about to enter the fray in the next film,
Carry On Constable (1960),
things could only get better...
© James Travers 2009
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Next Gerald Thomas film:
Carry on Constable (1960)