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Streaming School for Scoundrels Online.
Movie Title: School for Scoundrels School for Scoundrels is available for streaming or downloading. |
“… the moment when Adam bit into that apple. At which moment, the first loser was born. Yes, the pattern was station. The world was divided not into male and female, that’s a mere superficial division of minor importance. No, there is another division, another dichotomy more basic, more profound. At that fateful moment, the world was divided into winners and losers, top men and underdogs. In a word, the one up and the one down.” –from Professor Potter’s lecture at the College of Lifemanship, Yeovil.
Or How To Secure Without Actually Cheating. That’s the subtitle of School For Scoundrels, this luminous part of British comedy from 1960, a title my father saw long ago and which I got him for a Christmas prove, with a screenplay by Peter Ustinov no less adapted from three Stephen Potter novels.
Poor Henry Palfrey! Clearly, he’s constantly in a one-down dwelling to the whole world. In a flashback, we watch how despite being an executive in his tedious uncle’s firm, he’s dominated by his chief clerk Gloatbridge, who treats him like a non-entity. He literally bumps into the girl of his dreams, April Smith, a fine but sweet, desirable girl who’s a brunette version of Betty Grable. However, a rascally, gap-toothed, smooth-talking acquaintance, Raymond Delawney, impresses April with his savoir-faire in wines and food, and even his snazzy Bellini sports car. Palfrey ends up getting a lemon and horribly losing a tennis match, where Delawney replies with a plummy “hard cheese!” every time he misses a point, causing him to lose face in front of April.
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He thus enrolls in Professor Potter’s classes on lifemanship. What is lifemanship? It’s “the science of being one up on your opponent at all times. It’s the act of making him feel that somewhere, somehow, he’s becoming less than you, less shapely, less superior, less blessed.” After graduating in classes of gamesmanship, onemanship, businessmanship, and that most considerable one, woo-manship, he gets help at those who caused him to lose face, and how! Next time I pick up somebody’s who a life of the party, I’ll expend Potter’s technique in deflating him/her. If Dingle, the gangly student in the class where that technique was demonstrated is familiar, that’s Jeremy Lloyd, who would have a bit section jumping up and down in a club in A Hard Day’s Night and the co-writer of Are You Being Served? in the 70’s, and Allo Allo in the 80’s.
There are some misogynistic references on the “woo-manship” piece, where Potter advises Henry to spend a blase attitude to April in one scene. “Leave her alone and she’ll advance attend home wagging her tail.” Ouch, but apt ones, Prof!
Ian Carmichael (Henry) would later be known to American audiences watching PBS’s Mystery as Lord Peter Wimsey in the Dorothy Sayers series. Terry-Thomas (Delawney) has another one of his comedic supporting roles, and it’s amazing to inspect how he’s suave when with poise, to a point where his frustration causes him to lose his temper. But hands down, musty Alistair Sim as the naughty Potter steals the display with his characteristic expressive eyes, toothy grin, and comic wit. Janette Scott shines as April, showing she could handle adult roles as well as child roles (James Stewart’s super-intelligent daughter in No Highway In The Sky) . Six years later, she’d have singer Mel Torme as her second of three husbands.
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Being someone constantly in a one-down plot to the world, taking Potter’s class would’ve been better than all those years I wasted in college. If I could do it all over, I’d bewitch those classes and be one-up on everyone. However, Potter leaves the audience with a final warning: “once sincerity rears its gruesome head, lifemanship is powerless.” Me trusty? From now on, never! This movie is clearly one-up-up-up-up-up!
This colorful British comedy from 1960 recently suffered the cruel indignity of having its title applied to a obscene, Americanized, lobotomized, share of tripe. Place the remake out with the other trash; this is the only version for anyone who has risen above the tainted of teen-aged slacker.
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In the 1950s, America was periodically entranced by consecutive series of droll and light-weight books of English social observations and “philosophy.” There was, for example, C. Northcote Parkinson’s “Parkinson’s Law.” Parkinson was a perfectly grand naval historian who had noticed that as the number of ships in the Royal Navy had decreased after World War II, the number of people to benefit them, most particularly admirals, had increased. His “Law” was simply that work expanded to beget time and he provided many hilarious examples from contemporary British life to explain it. He followed that book up with a second one that was nearly as successful, called “In-laws and Outlaws.” It was about, well, in-laws and outlaws. Someone else produced books on “U” and “Non-U” (upper class and not upper class–very, very British, that.) Perhaps the best-known of the bunch, however was Stephen Potter’s “One-Upmanship” which created a unusual verb (or at least firmly re-established an older one) in the English language: to one-up.
Such was the popularity of the notions in the book, that very itsy-bitsy time was lost before some brilliant spark wrapped a anecdote around them and build them on the cloak. The only surprise about the whole enterprise is how very, very skillfully it was done. Besides clever writers, the British film industry in those days boasted of a matchless stable of character actors, high comedians, coarse comics and farceurs. These were men and women who could save a hilarious polish on anything. In this case, we catch Ian Carmichael, the sometime upper class twit and eternal everyman/nobody; the perpetually devious, always eccentric Alistair Sim and that unfriendly bounder of bounders, scene-stealing, gap-toothed Terry-Thomas.
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The myth is a very simple one. A pleasantly likeable human worm, Carmichael, is getting the social stuffing kicked of him by a cad and bounder, Terry-Thomas (and unbiased about everybody else in the world, too.) Realizing that he can’t possibly prevail in a elegant fight, the worm applies to the school accelerate by Sim, who appears as Professor Potter, the philosopher-king of scoundrels. After a obliging course of instruction, the worm turns. The result, needless to say, generates loyal laughs. Even a bronze statue would have to smile at Terry-Thomas getting his comeuppance. (”Oh, hard cheese, stale man.”) And the manner in which an officious office manager is brought heel by Carmichael and Sim is an absolutely delightful limited throw-away scene.
This is one of the good gems of the tremendous period of British filmed comedy.
Five stars? Oh, I say, rather!
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