The Happiest Days of Your Life

Nutbourne College is an old, established boys' boarding school. A letter comes from the Ministry: because of wartime restrictions, another school is to be billeted there. The school that turns up is a girls' school. The two heads, Wetherby Pond and Muriel Whitchurch, go to war with each other and with the Ministry at the same time. Classrooms, dormitories and corridors are divided up. Then it emerges that the parents and the inspectors are arriving on the same day, and the two heads have no choice but to work together. Frank Launder directs the British comedy; eighty-one minutes, with Alastair Sim as Pond and Margaret Rutherford as Whitchurch, adapted from John Dighton's play. The same team brought out the St Trinian's films a few years later, and their tone comes from here.