As a precocious French pupil who seduces the new male teacher at a prim girls’ school, Zetterling steals the film. French-English director Edmond Gréville pushes at the moral limits of what was permitted within post-war British cinema, in this reflection upon a man’s mid-life crisis and the emergence of the teenager as a dangerous breed.
Publicity notes for ‘The Romantic Age’
Edmond Gréville, the French director of The Romantic Age, has long had the intention of making a film with a Girl’s Finishing School for a background. At first he intended to make such a film in France for a French producer who owned the rights of Serge Weber’s novel Lycée de jeunes filles, but, odd as it may sound, he found it impossible to find a cast for the picture, in France. He says that there are not sufficient pretty and talented teen-age girls there. Eventually he persuaded Pinnacle Productions to acquire the film rights of the novel, he adapted it for the screen himself and the dialogue was written by Edward Dryhurst and Peggy Barwell. Gréville transferred the whole setting of the story from France to England and the main background is now Littleton Girl’s Finishing School.
The story itself is a romantic triangle drama with an unusual twist. It concerns a middle-aged schoolmaster whose affections are captured in a series of diverting escapades by an 18 year-old French pupil at the Finishing School. His wife refuses, at first, to take the threat seriously and only realises what has happened when it is too late. The situation is finally resolved when the schoolmaster’s young daughter intervenes with a smart stratagem which brings him back to his family.
Edmond Gréville, who in France has acquired the reputation of being a ‘woman’s director’, although Noose, which he made in England, shows him from quite a different aspect, has divided the screen-play into a series of long scenes which allow him to let his camera tell the story in long sweeping movements. In order to employ this technique which is characteristic of Gréville’s work, Lighting Cameraman Hone Glendining is employing deep focus photography for the whole of the film.
Mai Zetterling is starring as the French girl, Arlette, a role which will show this talented Swedish star in an entirely new light. After a succession of sympathetic roles in which Miss Zetterling has usually been the subject of an unkind fate, she will now be seen as a designing minx who wreaks havoc in the settled family life of the staid schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster, Arnold Dixon, will be portrayed by Hugh Williams, who faces a difficult task in this role which consists of two almost entirely different characterisations – on the one hand he is the sedate middle-aged schoolmaster and family man, but after Arlette goes to work on him he is suddenly transformed into an irresponsible playboy to whom work and family mean nothing.
Helen Dixon, his forgiving wife, is played by Margot Grahame and Petula Clark brings all her youthful vitality to the role of Julie, their daughter. For the other girl roles Gréville has selected a number of talented young actresses, some of them, like Carol Marsh, Margaret Barton and Dorothy Latta, have already a number of films to their credit. American Dorothy Latta was a Warner Bros. starlet in Hollywood until marriage brought her to England. Most of the other girls will be facing the cine-camera for the first time. Gréville expects that a fair number of those girls will justify the hopes he has pinned on them and become permanent assets to the British screen.
Some of the exterior scenes showing Littleton Girl’s Finishing School were filmed at Great Fosters, a palatial country house near Egham, which was originally built for Anne Boleyn, but is now a fashionable country hotel. Even the grounds of the hotel were found to be eminently suitable for the film as they include a cottage which, in the film, is inhabited by schoolmaster Arnold Dixon. Other scenes, mainly a treasure hunt, will be filmed on the lot at Denham and in the countryside surrounding Denham Studios.
Quartet (extract)
An attractive woman seduces and robs a young man at a casino in this Somerset Maugham adaptation.
Quartet (extract)
Director: Ralph Smart
UK 1948
22 mins
35mm
The Romantic Age (aka Naughty Arlette)
Director: Edmond T. Gréville
Production Company: Pinnacle Productions
Producer: Eric L’Epine-Smith
In charge of production: Edward Dryhurst
Production Manager: Harold Richmond
Assistant Director: Peter Bolton
Continuity: Olga Brooks
Screenplay: Edward Dryhurst, Peggy Barwell
From the novel by: Serge Weber
Director of Photography: Hone Glendining
Camera Operator: Cecil Cooney
Editor: Ralph Kemplen
Art Director: Anthony Mazzei
Dress Designer: Eleanor Abbey
Make-up Supervisor: Tony Sforzini
Hairdressing Supervisor: Vivienne Walker
Music: Charles Williams
Recordists: Dudley Messenger, George Croll
Dubbing Editor: Harry Booth
1st Assistant Dubbing Mixer: Peter T. Davies *
Cast
Mai Zetterling (Arlette)
Hugh Williams (Arnold Dixon)
Margot Grahame (Helen)
Petula Clark (Julie)
Margaret Barton (Bessie)
Carol Marsh (Patricia)
Marie Ney (Miss Hallam)
Paul Dupuis (Henri Sinclair)
Raymond Lovell (Hedges)
Dorothy Latta (Virginia)
UK 1949
86 mins
35mm
A BFI National Archive print
*Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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