Three from Britain

The Guinea Pig (Pilgrim Pictures; Variety Film) is a fair example, in a minor key, of a kind of film the British often do superbly: the movie which at once reveres and ribs British types and institutions. At its best, this kind of film, like the novels of Charles Dickens (see BOOKS), is rich in unabashed sentiment and meaty caricature.

In Guinea Pig, the reverence and ribbing are directed at the British public-school system, traditional incubator of British snobs, heroes and statesmen. As part of a program inspired by the labor government, Jack Read (Richard Atten-borough), a kid from the wrong side of the London tracks, is enrolled in one of England's oldest, most snobbish schools. For several reels, while the camera conscientiously explores the virtues and vices of the school system, young Jack gets caned, taunted, snubbed and bullied by his masters and schoolmates. In the end he emerges a successful product of the British public-school system, with a stiff upper lip and an upper-class accent. Both upper & lower social classes, presumably, have learned a lot in the process.

Like most films of its breed (e.g., Colonel Blimp), Guinea Pig has an earnest and sometimes moving integrity. Unfortunately, it also has more than its share of sentimentality and smugness, and not enough humor to keep it from sliding into a kind of fatuous self-congratulation. To many U.S. moviegoers, its class-conscious propaganda in favor of British traditions will sound, perhaps wrongly, like so much Martian gobbledygook.

Sleeping Car to Trieste (Rank; Eagle Lion) has plenty of plot, but hardly enough steam to keep it moving. Like most British suspense films involving a train with a Balkan destination, it is compounded of political assassination and intrigue, seasoned with romantic love and good-natured kidding of British innocents abroad.

The story turns on an ambassador's diary, which is stolen from a Paris embassy and concealed aboard the Paris-Trieste-Zagreb express. As the train rushes on through the night, the plot drags tediously from one compartment to another, deliberately involving a whole gallery of British tintypes, a sprinkling of Frenchmen and a lone American G.I. In the resultant overcrowding, both action and suspense are very nearly suffocated. Following in a long line of brilliant British thrillers-on-wheels (e.g., Night Train, The Lady Vanishes), Sleeping Car rides at the end of a slow freight.

Miranda (Rank; Eagle Lion), a submarine romance heavily larded with submarginal humor, is a fairly poor sample of British whimsy which at its best is seldom very attractive to U.S. moviegoers. For its plot it takes a Cornish mermaid (Glynis Johns) on a month's visit to London as the paraplegic patient of a fashionable married doctor (Griffith Jones). From there on, with plodding, relentless persistence, Miranda the mermaid gets put through every gag possible to her peculiar physical construction. Rolling about in her wheelchair, her tail carefully concealed in chiffon, she is shown eating raw fish sandwiches, trying her first cigarette, swiping goldfish from the doctor's aquarium, in her bathtub bed, at the opera, and in the arms of various men. Together with the other characters in the film, she is also made to belabor some extravagantly bad gags. Sample (to the doctor's wife): "You've hated me ever since I set tail in this house." When Miranda finally heads back home to Cornish waters, via the Thames, everyone is greatly relieved.

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