Tom Brown's School Days (1940)

Dr. Thomas Arnold (Cedric Hardwicke) is working as a private tutor when he is appointed by the board of governors of Rugby School to serve as headmaster.  There he takes a hard line on disruptive behavior, expelling many students who will not respond to any other measures.  His new approach appalls the masters, the public and most of the school's governors, but one of these, Squire Brown, assures him of his unqualified support, and as proof, sends his own son, Tom (Jimmy Lydon) to Rugby as a student.  At Rugby, Tom quickly learns the ropes from fellow student East (Freddie Bartholomew).  He also learns to look up to sixth-former Brooke, the decent and upright head of the house, to revere the strict but benevolent Doctor, and to dread the cruel bully Flashman (Billy Halop), who treats him to a tossing in a blanket and also to a "roasting" -- exposing his backside before the fire.  Brown recovers from the roasting but honors the students' code of silence by not telling on Flashman, and with East leads a rebellion against bullying by the other students, culminating in a fist-fight that brings both Brown and Flashman up to the Doctor's study.  Both are disciplined for fighting, but Flashman is expelled for the roasting, and the other students believe mistakenly that Brown is the one who tattled, and he is ostracized by the students, most of all his close friend East.

Tom Brown's School Days was published in 1857 by lawyer, parliamentarian and social reformer Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), inspired by his own experience at Rugby during Thomas Arnold's headmastership, and the novel had a profound and long-lived influence on juvenile literature and popular fiction.  The success of the novel inspired a whole genre of fiction set in boarding schools, from novels such as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. to the very popular "school stories" serialized in boys' penny papers in the 20th century (George Orwell writes about them in his essay "Boys' Weeklies") to American prep-school novels such as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye and John Knowles' A Separate Peace.  Hughes' warm, sympathetic voice and the loose, episodic structure of his story broke with the heavy-handed moralizing of most literature aimed at young people while subtly showing his young hero's development into a young man with a sense of moral responsibility and duty.  In the introduction to his follow-up, Tom Brown At Oxford (1861), Hughes steadfastly denied that the Tom Brown character was autobiographical, but like Tom in the novel and like others of his generation who attended Rugby during Arnold's tenure, he had been deeply impressed with Arnold's gravity and moral uprightness and held him in awe all his life.  So influenced was he by his period at Rugby that his most grandiose social reform project -- a utopian settlement in the American state of Tennessee -- was named Rugby.  Flashman, the bully who is expelled for his behavior, went on to have an interesting career in a series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser relating his roguish adventures in the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

Thomas Arnold himself (1795-1842) is known to modern readers not only through his reverent depiction in Hughes' book but also through a more sardonic portrait in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  A historian, an Anglican churchman, and a man of religious zeal and staunch conservatism, father to poet and critic Matthew Arnold and great-grandfather to biologist Julian Huxley and novelist Aldous Huxley, he became renowned as an educational reformer for his changes to the system at Rugby and their subsequent influence on schooling in nineteenth-century Britain.  By our standards, his changes to the curriculum were slight: to the Greek and Latin classics that formed the basis of the syllabus, he added history, modern languages and mathematics (but not the physical sciences).  In fact few if any of his reforms were institutional or systemic in nature, and if they were effective at all, it was mainly due to the force of Arnold's own personality.  His main interest was in character-building and in instilling the Christian values he felt were missing from society at large.  He did not disturb the practice of corporal punishment for which English schools were notorious; in fact he considered it beneficial and Biblical and delegated its use to the sixth form, that class of oldest and most advanced students which he designated as an intermediate authority.  Nor did he abolish the peculiar instititution known as "fagging", in which junior students were employed by sixth formers as servants for tasks such as cleaning and errands.

Under Arnold's influence, the English public school (the term is a misnomer -- these were, and are, private, élite, fee-charging institutions catering to the sons of Britain's wealthy and high-born) became a sort of character-factory, impressing young men of wealth and privilege with the values needed to ensure the power and prestige of Britain at the height of its imperial age: loyalty to sovereign and country, adherence to the established religion, and a standard of personal rectitude commensurate with social expectations -- "brave, truth-telling English gentlemen", as Squire Brown says in the novel (and in that day and age, the word "gentleman" still carried a connotation of class status -- a working-class man was, by definition, not a gentleman).  In practice this meant that public-school boys learned, in the school environment, the necessity of social hierarchy, the importance of fitting into that hierarchy, and the responsibilities that came with class privilege.  In spite of the classical basis of the curriculum, the public school was not primarily intended to cultivate the intellect or to advance scholarship, still less was it meant to foster the arts and sciences or to provide occupational skills, but to provide the empire with its owners, statesmen, churchmen and officers.  The system quickly came to be closely associated with other things as well: corporal punishment, bullying, abuse of authority, situational homosexuality and sexual abuse, wealth and class snobbery, and neglect of health and safety.

As the empire declined and dissolved and the public-school system grew more anachronistic, these and other criticisms began to appear in English culture, illustrated by some random examples.  Orwell, who as a boy attended a small preparatory academy called St. Cyprian's in order to qualify for a scholarship to Eton, wrote in the 1940s the essay, "Such, Such Were The Joys", that described his experiences at that school: a context-free, cram-school approach to learning, bullying by students and by teachers, neglect, underfeeding, preferential treatment for the wealthier boys, and a gradually-internalized sense of inadequacy and helplessness characterized his account of the school, which he renamed "Crossgates" in the piece.  Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If... allegorically attacked Britain's class system and empty traditions as a group of underclassmen, fed up with their treatment at the hands of the sixth-formers, find a cache of arms and open fire at a Founders' Day gathering, in a dreamlike fantasy of revenge and rebellion (and a clear reference to Jean Vigo's 1933 Zéro de Conduite).  In the 1970s, the debut episode of Michael Palin and Terry Jones' comedy series Ripping Yarns, called "Tomkinson's Schooldays", was more a Monty Python-style lampoon of the clichés of the school-story than social criticism, but even here the brutality, the indifference to the well-being of students, the empty and mindless traditions, and the experience of the school as a molder of conformity rather than a means of physical, intellectual and emotional development, generated the typically surreal and irreverent treatment (a foppish, elegant School Bully who even intimidates the headmaster, the "school leopard" that catches boys who try to escape, junior boys chained to stakes to watch a football match, and the compulsory fight with the grizzly bear).

Today, period films, due to their expense, are almost always considered "prestige" films: Tom Brown's School Days is a relic of the time when in-period and costume films were a staple of the American film-goer's diet.  They were more vivid than realistic, and attenuated as far as any qualities, attitudes or language which might alienate or mystify the American filmgoer.  Dialects were often inconsistent or simply not used at all, unless they were used by actors to whom the accents came naturally.  The only exterior shooting notable in this film is a football match, the rest being done on soundstages in that highly stylized but effective use of artifice that was the trademark of the golden-age Hollywood period film, with sets and costumes which could have served as well in a Dickens adaptation (and at some point probably did).  A quartet of screenwriters, including producer Gene Towne, with additional dialogue by director Robert Stevenson, supplied dialogue that betrayed a very American sense of quick timing and wit under a thin veneer of Englishness.  In fact, only Cedric Hardwicke and co-star Freddie Bartholomew, whose career as a child actor consisted mainly of roles that exploited his delicate features and (carefully cultivated) English diction, seem quite at home in an 1830s English school; while sandy-haired, snub-nosed Jimmy Lydon seems more like an American farm boy finding himself unaccountably a scion of English country gentry, and Billy Halop is quite unable to shake his Dead End Kids inner-city image.  The plotline is considerably tightened in comparison to the novel, with a development of conflict between Brown and East that is missing from the original, but which plays well in the film.

Director Robert Stevenson (1905-1986) began to direct in British film in 1932 after two years as a screenwriter.  He came to Hollywood in 1939, where he directed at various studios while under contract to David O. Selznick, then contracted to RKO in the late forties.  The lion's share of his career was spent at Disney, where he directed many of the studio's live-action features, such as Old Yeller (1957), Son of Flubber (1964), Mary Poppins (1965), The Love Bug (1968), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971), and The Shaggy D. A. (1976).

Cedric Hardwicke (1893-1964) distiguished himself on the English stage and was given a knighthood in 1934 by George V.  He began to appear in American stage productions and films after 1936 and permanently emigrated to the United States in 1948.  His voice and polished demeanor made him a favorite character actor in films such as Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) and in the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956).

Jimmy Lydon (b. 1923) first distinguished himself as a juvenile actor in the 1930s on the Broadway stage, moving on to films for Paramount and RKO, becoming best known for his work in the Henry Aldrich series, based on the popular radio comedy.  He moved on to television in the early 1950s and finally to a career in television and film production.  He was especially memorable in Strange Illusion (1944), a Poverty Row noir drected by Edgar Ulmer (Detour) with a plot derived from Hamlet.

Born in Dublin and raised in England by an aunt, Freddie Bartholomew (1924-1992), had had London stage experience and appeared in two British films before accepting a role in MGM's David Copperfield (1935).  His earnest mien, English accent and dimpled good looks soon made him the second highest-paid child star in Hollywood after Shirley Temple and he appeared in such films as Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and Captains Courageous (1937).  As an adult he worked mainly in advertising, the wealth he had accrued in his childhood having been spent in lawsuits, particularly one highly publicized fight between his aunt and his birth mother over the right to his earnings.  The experience embittered him and he gave no interviews about his early career until shortly before his death.

Billy Halop (1920-1976) began his acting career in radio and then on the stage.  His appearance in the Broadway play Dead End paved his way to Hollywood when Samuel Goldwyn brought the play to the screen, and he worked on many installments of the ensemble-oriented Dead End Kids/East Side Kids films for Paramount and Monogram.  He was less successful as a solo actor and eventually worked in the 1950s as a salesman and in the sixties as a registered nurse.  He did have a recurring role in television's All In The Family where he played Munson, the owner of the cab company where Archie Bunker worked part-time.

I viewed Tom Brown's School Days on a DVD release from Alpha Video Distributors, whose large selection of budget-priced video releases of classic black-and-white "late show" film offerings have unfortunately disappeared from most existing retail video outlets in my area over the past several years, along with many of the outlets themselves.  As with most of Alpha's releases, this does not include anything in the way of supplementary material and is not a "remastered" version, but made from a 16mm print of the type you used to see in late-night television screenings of old films.