The Wildcats of St. Trinian's (1980)

The girls of St. Trinian's decide they are being asked to do too much work so they go on strike.

Director:

Frank Launder

Writers:

Ronald Searle (inspired by the original drawings of the Girls and Staff of St Trinian's), Frank Launder (original screenplay)

Stars:

Sheila Hancock, Michael Hordern, Joe Melia

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Sheila Hancock	...	Olga Vandemeer
Michael Hordern	...	Sir Charles Hackforth
Joe Melia	...	Flash Harry
Thorley Walters	...	Hugo Culpepper Brown
Rodney Bewes	...	Butters
Deborah Norton	...	Miss Brenner
Maureen Lipman	...	Miss Higgs
Julia McKenzie	...	Miss Dormancott
Ambrosine Phillpotts	...	Mrs Mowbray
Rose Hill	...	Miss Martingale
Diana King	...	Miss Mactavish
Luan Peters	...	Poppy Adams
Barbara Hicks	...	Miss Coke
Rosalind Knight	...	Miss Walsh
Patsy Smart	...	Miss Warmold

Storyline

The girls of St. Trinian's decide they are being asked to do too much work so they go on strike.

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Plot Keywords:

female protagonist | female nudity | school | uniform | schoolgirl | 

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Genres:

Comedy

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Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

21 August 1980 (Australia)

Filming Locations:

Bray Studios, Down Place, Oakley Green, Berkshire, England, UK

Company Credits

Production Co:

Wildcat Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

91 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Did You Know?

Trivia

It was hoped that George Cole would play Flash Harry but he was not free.

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Connections

Followed by St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)

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Soundtracks

St. Trinian's School Song
(uncredited)
Composed by James Kenelm Clarke (ad James Clarke) & Malcolm Arnold
Performed by Girls' Chorus of More House School, Kensington, London

User Reviews

Uhhhh. . .

This movie starts out with a group of younger "fourth-form" girls from the titular "St. Trinian's" girls' school singing a surly rendition of their school song, which is strangely intercut with shots of the more mature "sixth-form" girls doing a sexy dance in unfeasibly short skirts. This strange opening scene is very typical of the strange movie to follow. Not being British, I'm not really familiar with the earlier 50's and 60's "St. Trinian's" films. I know they featured rebellious, cigarette-smoking, working-glass schoolgirls and were not quite as innocuous and family-friendly as something like "The Trouble with Angels". Still they really couldn't have hoped to compete with the saucy, sex-obsessed fare that dominated home-grown British cinema by 1980, and they really shouldn't have tried to.

Not that this is a sexy, "adult" movie by any means. There's a scene where the girls trick their voluptuous gym teacher (perennial British cheesecake actress Louanne Peters) into going for a nude swim and then steal her clothes, which somehow results in her spending the rest of the movie in a clinic bed with a thermometer in her butt (offscreen, of course). There's also a scene where a couple of busty sixth formers (including Debbie Linden from Pete Walker's "Home Before Midnight") pose topless for pictures in the notorious page 3 of the "Sun", which the the dirty old rotters in the Ministry of Education proceed to lecherously drool over. But while this is obviously isn't a children's film, it's hardly a Mary Millington sex flick either. Nor is it even really a "coming-of-age" movie like the American film "Little Darlings" (which it somewhat resembles). The girls, by and large, aren't interested in sex or "losing it", but instead have hatched some half-assed scheme to "unionize" all the girls' schools in Britain and start a "general strike" (Way to belittle the British labor movement of the era!)

Near the end of the movie, Debbie Linden and some of the more sex-obsessed sixth-formers have been "infiltrated" by a group of boys, who are "spies" for the Ministry (don't even ask), and they are all having some kind of half-naked, "petting" party out on a barge. For some reason this threatens the "solidarity" of the "strike", so the younger girls, who are leading the whole thing, dress up as pirates and invade the party, among other things smacking their older schoolmates with wooden swords on their barely-clad bums. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be racy or just funny, but it really isn't either. Like the opening scene, and pretty much the rest of the movie, it mostly just left me kind of agape and wondering exactly what anyone here was thinking when they made this.