Fun at St Fanny’s

Charley Moon

It’s Great to Be Young

Ramsbottom Rides Again

Invitation to the Dance

It’s a Wonderful World

A Touch of the Sun

On the Twelfth Day

Stars in Your Eyes

Up in the World

Five Guineas a Week

January

By the mid-1950s the veteran director Maurice Elvey was in the final phase of a career that had prospered since 1913 with his first feature, Motograph Film Company’s silent Maria Marten. He not only directed but wrote it and appeared as Captain Matthews. Before the advent of sound, he had 123 films to his credit; between 1930 and his death in 1967, he added another sixty-three, among which are several significant British films (many of them musical) that served as vehicles for leading performers of their day: Gracie Fields in Sally in Our Alley (1930), This Week of Grace (1933), and Love, Life and Laughter (1934); Ivor Novello in the brilliant I Lived with You (1933); Soldiers of the King (1933) for Cicely Courtneidge, and Under Your Hat (1940) for Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert; Road House (1934) for Violet Loraine and Gordon Harker; and Princess Charming (1934) for Evelyn Laye. His last pictures from the mid-1950s include three tightly budgeted entertainments, including Tommy Trinder in the army-life comedy You Lucky People (1955) and in 1956 Fun at St Fanny’s and Stars in Your Eyes, two films that seem to accentuate the very particular tastes of a director (and deviser) still, at the age of eighty, displaying a greedy appetite for innocent enjoyment. Courtesy of Elvey, a visit to St Fanny’s will answer many questions that may confound us. What are the inhabitants of Malta called? The boys at St Fanny’s have the answer: Maltesers.

By 1956, the British fondness for shows built around young boys at public schools and their not infrequently ill-educated and intoxicated teachers was nothing short of excessive. Will Hay had exploited the formula through the 1930s, appearing as Dr Alec Smart (think vice versa) in the 1935 Boys Will Be Boys and Dr Twist in Good Morning, Boys.