This very British comedy, adapted from Stephen Potter's satirical self-help books Gamesmanship, Oneupmanship and Lifemanship, was produced by Hal E. Chester, an American veteran of B-movies who came to England for the co-production of The Weapon (1956) and stayed. As the books offered no real story, Chester hired the multi-talented Peter Ustinov to concoct a story around the tongue-in-cheek life lessons of the books. What he came up with was the College of Lifemanship, where the motto is "He who is not one up is one down," and an everyman nice guy named Henry Palfrey who is tired of constantly being taken advantage of. Chester kept the story but found Ustinov's humor "too British" to play in America so Irish playwright Patricia Moyes and blacklisted American screenwriter Frank Tarloff were brought in for rewrites. Chester himself shared official screenplay credit with Moyes.
Ian Carmichael stars as the considerate Henry, Alistair Sim (in amiable eccentric mode) is the school's dean and senior instructor and Terry-Thomas is Henry's chief nemesis, a smiling python of an old chum named Raymond Delauney. Famous for his gap-toothed grin and posh affectations, Terry-Thomas plays Raymond as a glib, manipulative social bully who is, in the parlance of the film, constantly getting one up on our hero. Henry, however, is a quick study under the tutelage of Sim, who teaches underhanded tactics with the paternal smile of a wily grandfather, and the film follows his vengeance on all who took advantage of his earlier meekness. Filling out the cast is Janette Scott as the sweet young beauty Raymond attempts to woo away from Henry and Dennis Price and Peter Jones as a pair of used car salesman with con-man patter.
Ian Carmichael was a popular leading man in England who found his niche in comedies like Private's Progress (1956), Lucky Jim (1957) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). School for Scoundrels reunited him with inveterate scene-stealer and joker Terry-Thomas, his co-star in Lucky Jim and I'm All Right Jack. Carmichael recalled that during a break from shooting School for Scoundrels, while hanging out on a street where his co-star had illegally parked his convertible, Terry-Thomas pulled a toy machine gun loaded with ping-pong balls from his back seat and opened fire on a pair of policeman with a grin. Only in a country where the patrol officers don't carry guns.
Alistair Sim is best known to American audiences as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1951 screen version of A Christmas Carol, but to British audiences he was a beloved star famed for playing the eccentric detectives of Green for Danger (1946) and An Inspector Calls (1954) and offbeat authority figures in the comedies The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) and Blue Murder at St. Trinians (1957). His eccentricities continued in School for Scoundrels, where he decided that he would not handle props while filming. Carmichael described one scene where his character was the guest of the headmaster but, contrary to longtime tradition, Sim refused to play the typical role of host and pour the tea as written in the script. "He didn't want to handle it," Carmichael recalled in an interview years later. "A lifemanship ploy emanating from character, or an abhorrence of handling props? I don't know, but I certainly got the impression that there was quite a bit of the latter."
Director Robert Hamer was a veteran of Ealing Studios and director of the darkly comic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). He brings a similar satirical approach to this film along with the physical comedy of the centerpiece tennis matches, a mix of psychological games and slapstick antics. He was also a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon toward the end of the production. Chester, who had mortgaged his home to cover the production, fired Hamer and stepped in briefly behind the camera before bringing in filmmaker Cyril Frankel to finish the shoot. Hamer never directed another film and died just a few years later at the young age of 52.
The film was hit in England and a success in the U.S., but it was Terry-Thomas who became the break-out star and he was soon off to Hollywood, playing comic support in Bachelor Flat (1961) and joined the star-studded casts of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
Sources:
Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas, Graham McCann. Aurum, 2009.
Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and The Belles of St Trinian's, Mark Simpson. The History Press, 2009.
BFI Screen Online.
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
