hugh1971

Yes, it's a slightly creaky and low budget 1950s comedy with a minimal plot, but anyone who loves the world of the shabby, down at heel, faux-genteel English confidence trickster will love this film.

The two male leads have great chemistry as a pair of fake ex-military city gents getting out of their depth in a share dealing swindle in 1950s London.

There are some lovely comic moments and amusing repartee. I particularly liked the scene with the tricksters at home in their bedsit in London's seedy Camden Town district, getting dressed up in dinner jackets to attend a posh dinner - and having to walk all the way to Kensington because they can't afford the bus fare.

William Hartnell is also good as an old fashioned but efficient company boss who refuses to fall for the pair's tricks. Well worth a watch.

I do think this is possibly one of the worst films I've ever seen. Carry on England was dire, but the Windsor Davies/Ken Connor routines weren't bad and the film seemed at least competently produced, but Emmanuelle is just poor from so many angles - technically - the awful cheap film stock which looks like it was leftover from a Shake 'n' Vac commercial, the crass innuendos and the need to hammer home obvious jokes (eg: I left in 1953. But the war ended in 1945...?).

Then there's the stock footage of London tourist spots in a lame attempt to interest overseas viewers, and the rubbish sub-Terry Gilliam 'special effects'. We also get the staple flouncy homo and comedy pakistanis. The acting is woeful with the good actors looking embarrassed or bored and the bad ones trying too hard. Miss Danielle, though very pretty, was I suspect overenthusiastically cast in the Mary Millington mould - perhaps the protégé of someone in the film industry who promised to 'make her a star'.

It's also very dated in its approach to sex. You can almost hear the writers thinking 'all that innuendo in the fifties and sixties is old hat, man. This is the permissive society now, and, like, sex is cool and everybody's doing it, even fat old ladies in launderettes!' This results in a number of sordid 'gags'(middle aged servants spying on a couple in bed, a leering football team queueing up for a gang bang, references to contraceptive pills, but strangely no reference to the clap, which I would imagine Emmannuelle must have picked up a few times - though perhaps STDs didn't exist in the mind of 1970s scriptwriters... etc).

The film even opens with the seventies fantasy of random strangers joining the 'mile high club'. One or two jokes made me laugh 'You for coffee? No I'm staying here' but these were few and far between.

This could have been so much better in the hands of a competent scriptwriter and the old Carry On gang, but as it is this is a sad shadow of the former films and not really a Carry On at all, but a feeble dated British sex comedy, which is neither sexy nor funny.

This film had such great potential and reminded me in many ways of my own schooldays, and did have some very funny and touching scenes (Brief Encounter!), but also failed on so many levels: 1. Wrongly marketed. Not a criticism of the film as such, but it was marketed in the trailers as a knock-about comedy, along the lines of an English 'American Pie'. I suspect this is the reason why so many dimwits walked out in horror when confronted instead by 'long words'.

2. Little or no analysis of the social and class implications of a bunch of middle/lower middle class state school boys going to Oxbridge. It was just taken as read. To be fair, Alan Bennett does say in 'Untold Stories' that an analysis of the Oxbridge experience is the subject for another film, but it would have made a better one, in my opinion. It was also extremely unrealistic in that all the boys got places - In my school only about half did.

3. The unrealistic treatment of homosexuality. I hesitate to use the term 'gay agenda' as it is generally the preserve of American fundamentalists, but the whole Dakin/Posner/Hector/etc love triangle (or should that be love square) did not ring true.

I went to an almost identical school at around the same time and I can assure you that there was NEVER any overt talk of same sex relationships, and boys I have know from other grammar and minor public schools have confirmed this. You simply would have been ostracised or beaten up if you had.

Yes of course there were boys who we knew or suspected were gay, and masters too, but the scene where Dakin hugs Posner and Posner says 'is that it' would just not have happened. Also, Dakin revealing himself as a predatory bisexual was a bit unlikely for someone of his age and experience - he hadn't even got to 'second base' with the school secretary so why would he have the confidence to attempt the seduction of a male teacher? Much as I admire Alan Bennett, this all seems to me purely the fantasy of an elderly homosexual playwright, which brings me onto my next point:

4. The unrealistic dialogue. The boys were simply TOO precocious. 17 and 18 year olds, even Oxbridge candidate geniuses, in my experience just don't talk like that or have that depth of interest in history and literature, or universal knowledge of films like 'Now, Voyager' and 'Brief Encounter'. Again, this was the dialogue of a 72 year old playwright being put into the mouths of the boys.

5. I got the impression that the black and Asian boy were put in as a gesture, and this is confirmed by the fact that they have little dialogue or character development, in fact pretty much the only lines they got were racially charged ones. This strikes me as the somewhat heavy-handed stamp of liberal/left guilt and tokenism.

I think Mr Bennett was basing the characters on his memories of grammar school boys in the early fifties, who probably were more erudite, but since the cultural revolution of the sixties (of which Mr Bennett no doubt heartily approves) adolescents mainly don't think or act like that any more, as popular culture has dumbed down immensely. The boys all spoke and acted far more like third year undergraduates than sixth formers. How many 18 year olds have a wry, sarcastic take on Christianity like the religious boy? How many 18 year old boys, however good looking, would act like Dakin?

I think the main problem is that The History Boys is a somewhat expressionist play ('a poem, not an essay' as Pinter would put it) which has been rather clumsily translated into a naturalist film and given a populist gloss. Whilst it has a lot of great scenes, overall it just doesn't work as well as it could. Sign me up for the Dead Poets' Society instead!