Spare the Rod *** (1961, Max Bygraves, Donald Pleasence, Geoffrey Keen) – Classic Movie Review 9174

Director Leslie Norman’s socially aware 1961 black and white film drama Spare the Rod is a sympathetic, involving exposé of the tough life in the British state schools of the day, with Donald Pleasence as a hesitant headmaster, Geoffrey Keen as a sadistic woodwork teacher and Max Bygraves as John Saunders, a nice, likeable new young supply teacher trying to cope with the aggressive London slum-area working class kids in a tough secondary modern school in the East End of London.

Director Norman achieves a satisfactory, documentary-style realism, even with affable singer/ comic Bygraves in the star part and a script by John Cresswell toned down from the original novel by Michael Croft, based on his own experiences of supply teaching in tough secondary schools.

Richard O’Sullivan and Jeremy Bulloch stand out among the kids. Also in the cast are Betty McDowall, Jean Anderson, Peter Reynolds, Eleanor Summerfield, Mary Merrall, Aubrey Woods, Rory MacDermot, Claire Marshall [Diane Marshall], Annette Robertson and Bryan Pringle.

Bygraves funded most of the budget, as he believed in the novel.

After skirmishes with the British Board of Film Censors, it was released in 1961.

Former Ealing Studios man Leslie Norman was the father of the late film critic Barry Norman.

Michael Croft was the founder and director of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. In 1950 he became a teacher at Alleyn’s boys’ school in Dulwich, South London, and wrote his novel while there. Reviewing the book for The Daily Telegraph, John Betjeman wrote: ‘I have seldom been more alarmed and affected by a new novel than I have by Spare the Rod. This is the first novel which shows a sense of narration and form, and with an absence of over-writing altogether admirable.’

It was made at Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, Middlesex, England, with location work at Ravenscourt Park Preparatory School, formerly Corona Stage School, Ravenscourt Avenue, Hammersmith, London.

See also the similar 1967 movie To Sir, with Love.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 9174

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