Cinema: Gymslip Brigade

The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s (Continental). “Is it absolutely necess’ry to have all these young ladies in court?”

“I fear it is, m’lord.”

“Then please put the fans on.”

The young ladies in question are the infamous belles of St. Trinian’s, a gymslip brigade of teacher’s pests who terrorize one of the seamier seminaries in Britain’s Poison Ivy League. The little horrors were hideously hilarious when they first came squiggling and splotching from the pen point of Cartoonist Ronald Searle. They even had a certain roachy charm in their first two films. But now the joke is as moldy as the girls—theater owners will be well advised to put the fans on.

Fortunately, there comes now and then a breath of fresh air, most of it from Joyce Grenfell’s direction. Comedienne Grenfell, who plays a sort of female Keystone Kop, brings to her part the appearance of a female Fernandel. Horse-faced and giraffe-bodied, long in the tooth and weak in the head, she seems to have been endowed by her creator with certain inalienable wrongs, among them five legs, seven elbows and 423 teeth. In one episode, she shows up as a harem girl to end all harems, and she almost saves the show when she whips out her trusty little recorder and shyly tootles an Elizabethan ditty called Woe Is My Bosom Friend, Lackaday.