Clive Baxter
A working-class boy wins a scholarship to a public school, as part of a post-World War Two experiment in bringing boys of different social classes together.
Will Hay, back in his role as a hapless teacher, is hired by a grim school in remotest Scotland. The school soon starts to be haunted by a legendary ghost, whose spectral bagpipes signal the death of one of the staff. Hay, assisted by Claude Hulbert and Charles Hawtrey, has to unravel the mystery before he becomes the next victim.
Before the war, a Fleet Air Arm pilot is dismissed for causing the death of a colleague. Working for a small Greek airline when the Germans invade Greece, he gets a chance to redeem himself and rejoin his old unit on a British carrier. This is regarded the last of the conventional, rather stiff 1930th style Ealing war films, to be succeeded by much more realism and better storytelling.
The Stars Look Down is based on A. J. Cronin's 1935 novel of the same name, about injustices in a mining community in North East England. While the novel follows the development of three young men in the small mining town, the film focuses on just one of them; the smart David Fenwick who gets a scholarship to university, meets a girl who only marries him because her former boyfriend has abandoned her, and eventually returns to the mine town as a teacher and takes part in a futile rescue effort when the mine is flooded, trapping both his father and his younger brother.
A disgraced officer risks his life to help his childhood friends in battle.
Adapted from the novel by Elizabeth Craik it tells the story of John Halifax who, despite humble beginnings, becomes a highly respected local businessman. As partner in a mill he weathers the turbulent economic times of the early 1800s.
A couple of lonesome wives, Marion Carter and Diana Cheswick fall for philanderer Leonard Drummon, and arrange to get their husbands, Geoffrey Carter and Morgan Cheswick, off to Paris so they can be free for one night of fun and frolic. The husbands are all for this as they think it will cure their wives of being infatuated with this man-about-town. And they might run into some fun in Paris. Actually, the philanderer is the one who put the idea in their heads to go away so the coast will be clear for his marauding raid party, with no intentions of curing anybody of anything.
