A gang of train robbers, including Alphonse (Frankie Howerd), stash the loot in an abandoned building, that later becomes the new home of St. Trinians, thanks to a grant from the new minister of education (Raymond Huntley). While Headmistress Amber Spottiswood (Dora Bryan), Flash Harry (George Cole), and the girls of St. Trinian’s return to their old tricks, Alphonse enrolls his daughters in the school to search for the money.
Society (or at least how it was portrayed) had changed substantially in the twelve years since The Belles of St. Trinian’s, and while the girls of St. Trinian’s were bizarre creatures in 1954, they were becoming commonplace by the mid ’60s. That the elder girls smoke, drink, and like to dance with males to rock-n-roll is hardly shocking, making The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery feel stuffy as it attempts to play these behaviors as astonishing. Only when the girls kidnap the agents of the department of education and when a fourth form girl acknowledges that, of course, she knows how to run a steam engine, do they feel properly antisocial and precocious.
Returning to the roots of the series, the setting is a boarding school (which hasn’t been the case since the first film). There is even a full staff, including a con artist, a prostitute, a card cheat, a stripper, a drunkard, and a greedy headmistress, played with the right mix of elegance and smarminess by Dora Bryan. And, like in The Belles of St. Trinian’s, the plot follows a criminal using his daughter (daughters in this case) to infiltrate the school. But unlike that earlier outing, the comedy doesn’t come from playing with the audiences’ expectations of the behavior of little girls, but from slapstick. There are people falling off a ladder, Morris dancers running into each other, and a piece of coal dropped on a bare foot. The film ends with a twenty minute chase. Cheapening the look of the movie, much of the “action” is played at an accelerated frame rate, which isn’t funny the first time, but does have the advantage of fast forwarding the picture through many of its least engaging moments. A few of the old jokes still work (and many of the jokes are old–previously appearing in the earlier films) and the cast, though weaker than in the other films, is still good.
The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery, the first St. Trinian’s film in color, is not a Post-War British Comedy. Too much time had passed. The same may be true of directors Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who were the force behind all five films. Their edge was gone, as this is a St. Trinian movie as an old man, who feels comfortable only in an earlier age, might make it. The other films in the series are The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954), Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s (1957), The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s (1960), and The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s (1980).