Rent The Browning Version (1951)
4.0 of 5 from 70 ratings
1h 27min
- General info
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- Synopsis:
- Public schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) has become a bitter, disillusioned man. Stuck in a loveless marriage with a wife Millie (Jean Kent) who openly cheats on him, the enthusiasm he once showed for his career and his pupils has long since vanished and The Crock' has become a figure of disdain among the students whose life he has made a misery. With ill-health forcing him to resign his long-standing post, a simple act of kindness from one boy has a profound impact on the seemingly heartless master.
- Actors:
- Michael Redgrave, Jean Kent, Nigel Patrick, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Brian Smith, Bill Travers, Ronald Howard, Paul Medland, Ivan Samson, Josephine Middleton, Peter Jones, Sarah Lawson, Scott Harold, Judith Furse, Theo Bryan, Michael Caborn, Vivienne Gibson, John Greenwood, Joan Haythorne, Michael Newell
- Directors:
- Anthony Asquith
- Producers:
- Teddy Baird
- Writers:
- Terence Rattigan
- Studio:
- Second Sight Films Ltd.
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama
- Collections:
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- Awards:
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- Unknown
- Run Time:
- 89 minutes
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Reviews (2) of The Browning Version
Himmler of the Lower Fifth Gets the Last Word - The Browning Version review by griggs
A schoolmaster’s farewell is rarely the stuff of high drama, but The Browning Version makes it quietly devastating. Andrew Crocker-Harris, the much-mocked “Crock, the Himmler of the Lower Fifth,” shuffles into retirement battered by ill health and worse esteem. His revelation — discovering what colleagues and pupils really think of him — is the film’s aching centrepiece, understated but shattering.
Michael Redgrave plays him with superb restraint, turning rigidity and regret into something painfully human. Watching the humiliations pile up in the second act is almost unbearable, not because the film forces it, but because Redgrave shows a man enduring in silence, too proud to fight back. Millie, his wife, is openly cruel, lashing out with casual venom while carrying on an affair with a colleague so relaxed he barely registers the drama. At times she turns oddly defensive or even affectionate. Some may see this as intentional — a portrait of a woman both embittered and conflicted — though it can just as easily read as a character stretched thin to serve the plot. Either way, her cruelty defines the marriage and sharpens Crocker-Harris’s humiliation.
What Rattigan’s story understands is that pity isn’t weakness. To pity is to care, and to stop caring altogether is where real cruelty begins — something Mrs Crocker-Harris embodies all too well. Which is why the Agamemnon scene works: Redgrave has built to it with such precision that every clipped line and pause lands like a breaking wave. Around him, the cast orbit with mixed success: Jean Kent makes Millie’s malice icy, while Nigel Patrick’s relaxed Frank Hunter throws Crocker-Harris’s stiffness into sharper relief.
Anthony Asquith directs with economy, letting silences weigh more than speeches. Stagebound at times, yes, but cinematic in its framing of the school as both place and prison. The conclusion could so easily have tipped into sentimentality, but it doesn’t. It earns its emotion through understatement, leaving us with something not triumphant but deeply compassionate. The Browning Version remains one of the most profoundly sad yet quietly humane films of its kind.
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Classroom drama. - The Browning Version review by Steve
Powerful adaptation by Terence Rattigan of his own one act play about the last few days in post of a pompous, unprosperous classics master in an English public school. The middle aged teacher is forced to evaluate his humiliating marriage and dismal career, and unexpectedly elicits a little hope before the final fadeout.
The overwhelming strength is a showpiece performance by Michael Redgrave. He starts the film as a shuffle of sterile mannerisms, but then gradually colours in the whole of the man, inviting our understanding without resorting much to sentimentality. Jean Kent also excels with her portrayal of his ruthless, unfaithful wife.
Rattigan's script reveals in painful clarity the awful process through which the promising scholar became the inert, complex oppressor of the lower fifth, backfilled with disappointment and forfeiture. He becomes a ghoul who purveys boredom, because that is the only sphere left in which he excels.
It's a brilliant fusion of character and performance. The film also advocates for education as a kind of socialisation rather than the mere passing on of knowledge. Anthony Asquith (like Rattigan) fell out of favour over the next decade. He may not have a critically approved visual signature, but he directed so many classic British films.
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