Rent The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950)

Classic British Comedy - The Happiest Days of Your Life review by GI

A great British classic comedy in the mould of the Ealing Comedies and the St Trinians films, indeed the British class based private school system was a launchpad for comedy in film, literature and comics. Indeed you can see how films like this later influenced the early Carry On movies and later comedy such as TVs Fawlty Towers. But this is a cut above because of the fantastic lead actors in Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford (often forgotten British treasures). It's basically a farce centred around the restrained attitudes to sex and gender politics and one or two aspects may seem out of place to a modern audience. Set in the comedy gold world of a public school Sim plays Wetherby Pond, a pompous headmaster who fawns around the parents and Governors in the hope of advancement. When a Girls School is boarded with his boys it's more the gender mix of the teachers that causes such a hullabaloo rather than the pupils. This is a gloriously funny film and portrays a nostalgic picture of post war rural England.

Classroom comedy. - The Happiest Days of Your Life review by Steve

Jolly farce set in an English public school. Its chief merit is the pairing of Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford as the cranky Heads of two schools, for boys and for girls, who find themselves having to share the same premises after the Ministry for Education gets its files in the wrong box. This is sitcom... 

Most of the humour is drawn from on the chaos of trying to keep the snafu hidden while the school is inspected by fussy parents and assessors. A classroom of boys must be instantly transformed into a gym session for girls... There aren't many great gags, most of the fun comes from watching the perfectly cast stars.

Sim and Rutherford built reputations as expert scene stealers, but this time they are aced by Joyce Grenfell in a small early role as a sexually repressed games mistress. Shame she didn't get more lines as she is a real standout. Obviously, there is crossover between this and the more anarchic St. Trinian's films.

Some gentle satire is lobbed at the hapless bureaucracy of the men from the ministry, a common target for comedy writers after WWII. Maybe it's awkward that these inhibited spinsters and fusty bachelors are such fair game. And it's a bit sad that the sexes pitched in together is assumed to be an absurdity! But! This was England...