St Trinian's returns to the big screen

Contrary to received opinion, the St Trinian's girls were not as naughty as all that. Only rarely did they stab a mistress or string her up to the branch of a tree. Their behaviour on the lacrosse field was nowhere near as violent as detractors have claimed.

We are shortly to become reacquainted with St Trinian's. Work has begun on a new film dealing with the little harpies from the most notorious girls' school in British film history. The cast includes Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Russell Brand. Expect to see the more nubile members of the lower sixth in gym slips and black stockings disporting themselves on the beaches and in the bars of the Riviera.

Ronald Searle based his St Trinian's cartoons (which inspired the films) on a real school called St Trinnean's in Edinburgh. Miss Fraser Lee, the headmistress of this school (which was in existence from 1922 till 1946), was so exasperated at being mocked by Searle and by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (the British filmmakers behind the original St Trinian's films) that she published a book setting forth her side of the story.

The Real St Trinnean's, which appeared in 1962, is a very curious volume. It has a photo of Miss Lee before the introduction. A stern-faced, grey-haired woman in a black gown, she looks not unlike Miss Fritton, the headmistress played by Alastair Sim in the first film, The Belles of St Trinian's (1954). Ironically, Miss Lee's rhetoric is not unlike that of Miss Fritton either.

"When poor Freda and I started this school during the General Strike of 1926, we vowed to make it the happiest carefree establishment in the whole of Britain," trills the fictional Miss Fritton in The Belles of St Trinian's. "And what a gay Arcadia of childhood it was until the war broke out and people with money lost it."

Compare this with Miss Lee's nostalgic remarks: "When St Trinnean's began [it was] a new venture made in faith and hope and growing each year more full of 'light and joy' until 1946, when after the Second World War, still in our wartime home, I had to close the school and disappoint so many." You could be forgiven for thinking that Fritton and Lee were sisters. They shared a similar attitude towards education. St Trinnean's was known as "the school where they do what they like." Miss Lee said her school was "certainly very revolutionary, and we met with criticism, of course."

Miss Fritton's methods proved equally contentious. As she famously put it: "In other schools, girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared."

Miss Lee had one particular bugbear about the films: she couldn't stand the unkempt way in which the girls dressed or the inference that her own beloved pupils had been equally dishevelled. Sounding a little like Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, Lee wrote purple paragraphs about the school uniforms that she provided. "Our uniform was taken from nature. The blue sea and golden sand and brown seaweed of lovely Iona, where I had spent many happy summers, gave me the colours - the coat a Harris crotal tweed and the Saxe-blue tunic and tussore silk blouse."

As film historian Geoff Brown notes in his book on the work of Launder and Gilliat, the first St Trinian's film had some moderately serious, if satirical, points to make about British society after the war. The film begins with the school teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. "The idea is mooted that St Trinian's school has reached its sorry plight through England's decline and the decline of its stable social order which existed before the war."

The St Trinian's films, beginning with The Belles and continuing with Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957), The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960), The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966) and The Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980), were all big money-spinners. They are - at least occasionally - very funny. They showcase some fine comic actors, such as Terry-Thomas, Frankie Howerd, George Cole and Joyce Grenfell. Reviewers were generally enthusiastic, seeing the films as the natural successors to the anarchic and goofy British comedies made by the likes of Will Hay in the 1930s.

Great public affection grew for the "little horrors", as the girls were nicknamed. Over the series, there were many moments to savour. In Blue Murder, for example, we have the girls running amok through the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome. (Launder later admitted he had misled the Italian authorities, telling them "the film was a cultural documentary" to be allowed to shoot in such sacred places.)

In Pure Hell, we see all the pupils in the docks, wearing scruffy uniforms and oversized straw hats. "It's a sad and sickening sight to see an entire girls' school arraigned before the highest criminal court in the land," intones a grim-faced prosecution lawyer. Their crime is to have set fire to their school and then to have played their violins in hideously discordant fashion as they watch it burn to the ground. And, no, they are not in the slightest repentant.

The Great Train Robbery, inspired by Ronnie Biggs and co, boasts some memorable set pieces with hapless schoolgirls scooting up and down railway lines as if on leave from a Buster Keaton comedy.

It is hard not to regard the St Trinian's films, though, with at least a tinge of regret. None came close to the sustained hilarity of The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), Launder and Gilliat's inspired farce about the chaos and misunderstandings that ensue when a girls' school, led by Margaret Rutherford, is billeted to a boys' public school. Nor do the films show much of the formal ambition of Launder and Gilliat's films of the 1940s, such as the brilliant propaganda film Millions Like Us (1943) or the quicksilver thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946). With St Trinian's, it was as if Launder and Gilliat were accepting the formulaic and the mediocre. This was not work that stretched them in any way.

There is a certain irony in Ealing Studios' decision to revive and update the franchise now. After all, the original St Trinian's films did not mark a golden moment in British film history. It is hard, too, to see how the filmmakers will capture the sheer inspired dottiness of performers such as Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell and Terry-Thomas. The St Trinian's girls came from an age of relative teenage innocence. Yes, in Pure Hell, the headmaster (Cecil Parker) came up with a plan to sell the best-looking sixth-formers to an Arabian harem. None the less, for all their mischief making, the kids were far less worldly than the teen idols of today.

Directors Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson have assembled an intriguing cast, complete with supermodels (Lily Cole), Bond girls (Caterina Murino) film stars (Rupert Everett) and such cherished household names as Stephen Fry. Ealing has already released some stills of its film. In one, we see around a dozen girls underneath Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, marching towards camera and looking as menacing as Warren Oates and Ernest Borgnine in The Wild Bunch.

It is a fair bet that Miss Lee, the headmistress of the original St Trinnean's, would be horrified by their swagger and insolence. After all, as an old girl once wrote of the education she provided, "not only intellectually was the pupil guided towards a satisfying maturity, but equal care was given to the building of character and to the development of a sense of social responsibility."

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