THE GUINEA PIG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 535, 23 September 1949, Page 15

THE GUINEA PIG

(Pilgrim Pictures-B.E.F.) HERE are some films which seem better the more you reflect upon them, and there are others-often thoroughly enjoyable during the actual screen-ing-which seem to spoil as fast as a cut apple, After a week-end cogitation, and with some misgivings, I would place The Guinea Pig in the latter category. The misgivings are there because I feel that for the performance of Richard Attenborough alone the film deserves a rating above the average, and because for rather more than three-quarters of its length, the picture is an admirable representation of that curious social organism, the English public ‘school. Most of us have enjoyed school stories at one stage or another of our development. Many of us can still enjoy them if there is an adequate infusion of realism such as one finds, say, in Bruce Marshall’s Prayer for the Living-and there is a good deal of that in The Guinea Pig, But in the film’s ending the realism is superseded by a stereotyped conventionality which leaves the dramatic potential: of the story unrealised, and the essential social conflict unresolved. This is no doubt the fault of the play on which the film is based, but it-is still a fatal weakness, The theme is one with great possibilities. Jack Read, an elementary schoolboy from Walthamstow, wins a bursary entitling him to be educated at Saintbury, an establishment obviously: intended for the sons of gentlemen. Equally obviously, Jack does not come within that category. His father is a ser-geant-major turned tobacconist and the boy himself has some shockingly lowclass habits. His h’s are insecure, he dips. bread in his gravy, and even talks Soccer at a Rugger school. In the argot of the place, he is rather frightful smear, even for a new bug. And of course, he suffers all the persecution which schoolboy sadism inflicts upon the noncomformist. At first he tries to run away, but is stopped by a sympathetic house tutor, Home for the Christmas holidays, he is half-inclined to stay away, but decides to go back, partly because of an innate stubbornness, partly because he is no longer at ease in the company of his old friends. The boy is, in fact, now in the very real dilemma of belonging to neither , world, yet this consequential problem is completely glossed over, and from this point the film, as a piece of realism, starts to go downhill. Jack begins to assume the caste marks appropriate to a Saintburian, He learns to tackle his man low and to keep a straight bat; and under the friendly eye of the understanding tutor he makes good progress in his studies. In the end even the reactionary housemaster ("A boy like that will always revert to type") is won over, the tutor marries the housemaster’s pretty daughter and takes’ over the House-which presumably means that future guinea pigs will have an easier time of it-and Jack

goes off to Cambridge with another bursary in his pocket. Passing over the inadequacies of the story, the chief attraction of the film-is the fine performance of Attenborough. There are a number of amusing thumbnail sketches of the curious fauna tradiditionally associated with a boys’ school, but the sustained performance of the star is astonishingly good. Not only does he act like a schoolboy of 14, he reacts like one, which is a much more difficult thing for an adult to do, when you come to think of it,