After burning down their school, the girls of St. Trinian’s are turned over to a “modern educator” (Cecil Parker) who is really being paid to kidnap the sixth form girls. It is up to Flash Harry (George Cole), police Sergeant Ruby Gates (Joyce Grenfell), and the entire fourth form, to rescue them.
This third St. Trinian’s outing continues in the direction of the second, Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s. There is no real lead, and not much cohesion. Instead, it’s a series of vignettes loosely held together by the thinnest of plots. The girls are barely in the film and for the most part, can’t be told apart. The sexy sixth form girls, played by actresses far too old to be in boarding school, exist to be ogled. The fourth form girls are a force of destruction, and most of their onscreen time is spent with them yelling while they attack.
Joyce Grenfell reprises her roll as the enthusiastic and naive policewoman, and her routine is still funny, but there is nothing I hadn’t seen in the two previous outings. More time is spent on her romance with her uninterested boss, Sammy (Lloyd Lamble). Once again, she has a scoundrel acting as a second suitor, this time in the form of veteran Post-War British Comedy actor, Cecil Parker (The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers). Parker is a wonderful addition to the cast, and equals Terry-Thomas’s cad seducer from Blue Murder, although I would have preferred an original plot point.
George Cole is also back as the greasy, smalltime crook, Flash Harry, and is still funny, but a little Flash is all that is necessary. In both this and Blue Murder, less Flash would have been more.
By this point in the series, the originality was gone. And for a film that bases its comedy on playing with the concept of a girls’ boarding school, almost no time is spent in one. Still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the devious schoolgirls and the helpless authority figures that have to deal with them. Plus, the sixth form’s striptease version of Hamlet should be the standard for performances of that play.
The other films in the series are The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954), Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s (1957), The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966), and The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s (1980).