VHS : The Guinea Pig [1948]

Rating: - Drama of social commentary executed with style
Made in 1948, this film illustrates well the preoccupation with class and the re-ordering of a better society that exercised the Post-War years. It is hard not to smile at the cut-glass accents and the failure even of that sterling West-Country boy Bernard Miles, who plays the young Attenbrough's father, to produce a plausible working-class accent. But there hangs over the film the sadness of those who died in battle and determination, even amongst the dinosaurs, to honour them by building a better tomorrow. The film charts the conversion of an idealistic but hidebound housemaster to a view of the world that accepts that the new role of the ruling class is to play midwife to a new order in which the doors of opportunity (and social advancement - aye, there's the rub, as if it were a self-evident good thing) are thrown open to the talented and energetic wherever they come from. The 'Tom Brown's schooldays' moments are watered down, though it is impossible to hide the inbred ghastliness of the public school ethos, and the end of the film ends with the baton being handed on to a younger, more progressive housemaster amidst a welter of 'Mister Chips' moments complete with syrupy music. But technically the film is so well done and so generous to all it portrays that it is hard to sneer at the crudeness of the premise of the plot and the manners of a very different kind of society which some of us still remember as yesterday.