The Guinea Pig [The Outsider] *** (1948, Richard Attenborough, Sheila Sim, Bernard Miles, Robert Flemyng, Cecil Trouncer, Joan Hickson) – Classic Movie Review 7285

Director Roy Boulting’s entertaining 1948 class drama The Guinea Pig (re-titled The Outsider in America) stars Richard Attenborough as 14-year-old Jack Read, the working-class son of London tobacconists Bernard Miles and Joan Hickson, who gets a scholarship to an exclusive, expensive British public school (ie private school) called Saintbury.

Jack is a Guinea Pig in a British post-World War Two social experiment, following the Fleming Report, to mix boys of different social classes in the British education system. Naturally, or there would be no story, he meets much snobbery through his supposedly uncouth behaviour as he tries to win acceptance from students and staff to fit in to the school.

Perhaps Attenborough’s evident maturity (he is 25) does not exactly help the film’s credibility but his stalwart acting does. Robert Flemyng and Cecil Trouncer chalk up successes as teachers. Attenborough’s real-life wife Sheila Sim co-stars as Trouncer’s wife, and young Anthony Newley plays one of the kids, Miles Minor.

It is now also valuable as an interesting social document, shedding much light on the British attitudes of the day.

The Guinea Pig is based on Warren Chetham-Strode’s 1946 play, and actor Miles and director Boulting help him write the screenplay. It is produced by John Boulting, shot in black and white by Gilbert Taylor, scored by John Addison and John Wooldridge, and designed by John Howell and Stanley Yeomanson.

Also in the cast are Edith Sharpe, Timothy Bateson, Clive Baxter, Basil Cunard, John Forrest, Maureen Glynne, Brenda Hogan, Herbert Lomas, Anthony Nicholls, Anthony Wager, Wally Patch, Hay Petrie, Oscar Quitak, Kynaston Reeves, Peter Reynolds, Olive Sloane, Percy Walsh, Norman Watson, Edward Judd, James Kenney, Digby Wolfe, Jack McNaughton, Judy Manning, Richard Hart, Robert Desmond, Desmond Newling, Michael Braisford and Colin Stroud.

The Boulting brothers production comes from Pilgrim Pictures, a new company set up by Filippo Del Guicide, and financed by a mystery industrialist. It was shot at Sherborne public school in Dorset. Controversy arose through the first screen use of the word ‘arse’.

It was a box office success in the UK, taking £224,694, but Americans must have been bewildered by most aspects of it on its original US release The Outsider.

RIP much-loved Sheila Sim (1922–2016) and Richard Attenborough (1923–2014).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7285

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