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A French Mistress
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A French Mistress
A French Mistress is a 1960 British comedy film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Cecil Parker, James Robertson Justice, Agnès Laurent, Ian Bannen, Raymond Huntley, Irene Handl and Thorley Walters.
It is based on a stage play, The French Mistress by Sonnie Hale under the pen name Robert Monro, first produced in 1955 at the Theatre Royal Windsor, starring Hale.
Production was filmed at Shoreditch Training College, Englefield Green, Borough of Runnymede, Surrey, England, formerly the Royal Indian Engineering College.
A young French woman, Madaleine Lafarge, is unintentionally appointed as the French teacher at an English public school for boys, which is not used to having women teachers. She causes a stir with pupils and other school staff, and complications ensue.
A romance develops between Lafarge and the headmaster's son who is also a teacher at the school. This is a cause of concern for the headmaster when he comes to believe that she is his daughter, from an affair he had during a holiday in France in his youth. He attempts to stop the romance by sacking her, so that she will go back to France, but the boys go on strike and nearly riot. All the problems are resolved when it becomes apparent that she cannot be his daughter.
Kine Weekly called it a "money maker" at the British box office in 1960.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A mildly amusing, quintessentially English farce, with stock material and jokes. But its stage origins give its plot some shape and its characters some consistency, while the relaxed and confident playing of Cecil Parker and James Robertson Justice in familiar roles makes the most of the few effective moments of dry humour. Given more wit or a wilder series of complications, given above all some relation to contemporary English life . . . so the reservations creep in. It is time surely that we pensioned off, even in farce, these phoney English public schools, fire-eating colonels, bird-watching vicars, sporty cane-brandishers and all the other dearly loved images of "the English as they see themselves"."
Variety wrote: "Billed as a "romp," the Boulting Brothers' latest entry grapples tenaciously with a fairly frail joke which doesn't stand up to its early promise. Based on a stage comedy ... it owes much to some determined comedy acting by well-tried British character thesps. ... Roy Boulting's direction is sufficiently light of touch to provide a reasonable quota of mild amusement. ... [it] is occasionally inclined to snigger at sex in a rather adolescent way, but, on the whole, it is a reasonable diversion for unsophisticated audiences."
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A French Mistress
A French Mistress is a 1960 British comedy film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Cecil Parker, James Robertson Justice, Agnès Laurent, Ian Bannen, Raymond Huntley, Irene Handl and Thorley Walters.
It is based on a stage play, The French Mistress by Sonnie Hale under the pen name Robert Monro, first produced in 1955 at the Theatre Royal Windsor, starring Hale.
Production was filmed at Shoreditch Training College, Englefield Green, Borough of Runnymede, Surrey, England, formerly the Royal Indian Engineering College.
A young French woman, Madaleine Lafarge, is unintentionally appointed as the French teacher at an English public school for boys, which is not used to having women teachers. She causes a stir with pupils and other school staff, and complications ensue.
A romance develops between Lafarge and the headmaster's son who is also a teacher at the school. This is a cause of concern for the headmaster when he comes to believe that she is his daughter, from an affair he had during a holiday in France in his youth. He attempts to stop the romance by sacking her, so that she will go back to France, but the boys go on strike and nearly riot. All the problems are resolved when it becomes apparent that she cannot be his daughter.
Kine Weekly called it a "money maker" at the British box office in 1960.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A mildly amusing, quintessentially English farce, with stock material and jokes. But its stage origins give its plot some shape and its characters some consistency, while the relaxed and confident playing of Cecil Parker and James Robertson Justice in familiar roles makes the most of the few effective moments of dry humour. Given more wit or a wilder series of complications, given above all some relation to contemporary English life . . . so the reservations creep in. It is time surely that we pensioned off, even in farce, these phoney English public schools, fire-eating colonels, bird-watching vicars, sporty cane-brandishers and all the other dearly loved images of "the English as they see themselves"."
Variety wrote: "Billed as a "romp," the Boulting Brothers' latest entry grapples tenaciously with a fairly frail joke which doesn't stand up to its early promise. Based on a stage comedy ... it owes much to some determined comedy acting by well-tried British character thesps. ... Roy Boulting's direction is sufficiently light of touch to provide a reasonable quota of mild amusement. ... [it] is occasionally inclined to snigger at sex in a rather adolescent way, but, on the whole, it is a reasonable diversion for unsophisticated audiences."