Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

The best of the classic English comedies are predicated on notions of Englishness. They use it as both a decorative element (as flavoring) and as an intensifier — because nothing is quite so funny as an Englishman attempting to maintain a facade of Englishness. You know he’ll ultimately fail. But you also know his demeanor in the face of that failure will end up revealing something essential about the English — their adaptability, perhaps, or the way their self-effacing drollness is of a piece with their perseverance.

In this 1950 comedy, adapted from a play by John Dighton, classic Englishness is embodied in the figure of Wetherby Pond, the dedicated but slightly ineffectual headmaster of Nutbourne College, a second-rate school for boys. Portrayed by the great Alastair Sim, Pond is awaiting an appointment at a more prestigious school, but he’s half expecting the offer to fall through; he has the air of a man accustomed to catastrophe. That catastrophe arrives in the form of Margaret Rutherford. Her character, Muriel Whitchurch, runs a school for girls, and through a bureaucratic hiccup it’s been accidentally relocated to Nutbourne — a real cause for alarm in the days of sexual segregation. It’s a fortuitous piece of casting: Rutherford is one of the few English actors capable of holding her own against the basset-eyed Sim. The pair does a duet of caricature that maintains an even tone even as it veers towards mannerism.

The movie is filled with gender details that today seem both ridiculous and sweet. The girls are shown being schooled in mime and Greek dance — the ludicrous kind, with fluttery gowns and plonkety tom-tom accompaniment. And when the boys are in gymnastics class they’re naked from the waist up; their partial nudity has the faintly erotic lilt of a bathing scene by Thomas Eakins.

The whole movie is sneaky-sensual like that. You catch whiffs of it in the furtive carnality of the second head mistress (she bats her lashes at the male teachers), as well as in the skimpy, hip-hugging shorts worn by the female students, whose bare legs compete for the boys’ attention during math studies. But it’s also evident in the gleeful, almost anarchic way in which the kids interact. Wisely, director Frank Launder portrays the children as a mostly undifferentiated mass, and he rarely indulges in cuteness. (A thudding reference to “Oliver Twist” is one of his few sour notes.) Instead we see them as their teachers must — not as autonomous beings but as an unruly confluence of urges, resistant to molding, to discipline, to order. When a group of parents visits Nutbourne, and the students are enlisted to help conceal the school’s co-educational bent, you can sense the kids’ glee at being loosed into a larger world, one not circumscribed by the dreary ritual of propriety but instead attuned to the thrill of sexual possibility. These scenes have the exultant, slightly sweaty fervor one typically associates with the ’60s and The Beatles. It’s like glimpsing the sexual revolution in embryo.