Rarely seen on British television now, The Guinea Pig is an early Richard Attenborough film, where the 23 year old actor manages to convincingly play a schoolboy from ages 14 to 18, in the same way he played a teenage gangster in Brighton Rock.
The Guinea Pig is the story of a working class boy from Walthamstow, who wins a scholarship to a top public school as part of a post war experiment by the Labour government, initially has a very rough time due to his background, but gradually settles in to school life and ends up going to Cambridge.
The main reason for watching The Guinea Pig is to see how public schools operated in the less liberal era of the 1940s. Jack Read( Attenborough) is made to act as a servant for a sixth former( a practice known as fagging) and caned for burning his toast, again true to life in many public schools. Also Read is later caned for daring to see a local girl, as this is against school rules, and the whole place is hidebound by ancient rules and customs, such as bowing to a statue of the school's founder. Unsettling and bizarre, this was how many English public schools operated until they became more liberal in the 1970s.
I would say watch The Guinea Pig more as a period piece than a source of entertainment as the theme music throughout is ponderous and heavy going, some of the characterisations are hammy upper crust( I say old chap) and it is very old. However, the happy ending, when Read is accepted into Cambridge and an understanding young master falls in love, is a nice touch and the film is one of Attenborough's less well known but good roles.
The Guinea Pig is the story of a working class boy from Walthamstow, who wins a scholarship to a top public school as part of a post war experiment by the Labour government, initially has a very rough time due to his background, but gradually settles in to school life and ends up going to Cambridge.
The main reason for watching The Guinea Pig is to see how public schools operated in the less liberal era of the 1940s. Jack Read( Attenborough) is made to act as a servant for a sixth former( a practice known as fagging) and caned for burning his toast, again true to life in many public schools. Also Read is later caned for daring to see a local girl, as this is against school rules, and the whole place is hidebound by ancient rules and customs, such as bowing to a statue of the school's founder. Unsettling and bizarre, this was how many English public schools operated until they became more liberal in the 1970s.
I would say watch The Guinea Pig more as a period piece than a source of entertainment as the theme music throughout is ponderous and heavy going, some of the characterisations are hammy upper crust( I say old chap) and it is very old. However, the happy ending, when Read is accepted into Cambridge and an understanding young master falls in love, is a nice touch and the film is one of Attenborough's less well known but good roles.