School for Scoundrels

Henry Palfrey loses at everything. His juniors at the office do not take him seriously, the garage sells him a broken car, he is beaten at tennis, and the woman he likes is taken by the supremely confident Raymond Delauney. Then he sees an advertisement: the College of Lifemanship, run by a man named Potter, who teaches people how to gain the upper hand. Robert Hamer directs. Ian Carmichael plays Palfrey, Terry-Thomas plays Delauney, Alastair Sim plays Potter. The source is Stephen Potter's books. Potter wrote the English middle class contest for status as a technique, setting out in the form of lessons the methods for unsettling an opponent in ordinary life; his books produced a concept of their own in Britain. The idea of the film is to stage those techniques. The small manoeuvres deployed on a tennis court, in a restaurant, while buying a car and while courting are shown step by step, and the comedy comes exactly from that calculation. It was Robert Hamer's last film. The director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, among Ealing's best comedies, could not finish shooting because of alcoholism, and the film was completed by others. Hamer died three years later. Terry-Thomas's Delauney is among the best known instances of the conceited Englishman he played throughout his career. Who it is for: viewers who like classic British comedy and humour about status. Who it is not for: the template repeats, the film cannot resolve its own idea at the end, and the woman functions entirely as a prize.