I am happy not being an alpha male, the kind of person who says things like the view never changing unless you’re the lead dog.  Then there’s the thing about staying on the porch if one cannot keep up with the big dogs.  You know there’s something wrong with a way of living if so much of the behavior is analogous to that of canines.  As for myself, I don’t want to be a dog.

It is unlikely Ian Carmichael, the star of 1960’s School for Scoundrels, wants to be one, either, but he is also tired of being a doormat for so many others.  There is alleged friend Terry-Thomas, who steals away the girl with whom he is smitten (Janette Scott).  There are his employees, who don’t bother to conceal their disdain for him.  Even before we see Carmichael, we see some young employees of a firm lounging around without concern.  They were about to snap to attention when they realize it is only him, their boss.

And so he heads out to Lifemanship County, which is where he disembarks the train.  I find it telling that is also the very last stop on that rail line.  Once off the train, a series of signs direct him to the “College of Lifemanship”, though the circuitous route goes back through the train yard and up a trail through some rather rough looking countryside.  His destination will turn out to be a Victorian mansion behind which good matte work has placed large industrial silos.

Alastair Sim is at his sleazy best as the dean of this school, which is where males beta and lower learn to master his patented technique of “oneupmanship”.  As he explains: “There is dichotomy: the world is divided into winners and losers.  Top men and underdogs. Oneupmanship is the art of making your opponent feel less than you.  He who is not one up is one down.”  Note the “underdogs” in that one sentence—again with the dogs.

The students learn many underhanded tricks, though never through direct confrontation.  A good synonym for oneupmanship is passive-aggressiveness.  This will especially prove effective for how Carmichael will eventually deal with Terry-Thomas, gaining an advantage over the one who believes themselves superior by making them lose their cool.  And our hero’s opponent will surrender his advantage spectacularly.

Courses our protagonist attends include clothesmanship, partymanship, carmanship, gamesmanship, doctormanship, accountancymanship and woo-manship  The last of those is instruction for how to be a complete cad, and the film walks a fine line while we wait to see if the protagonist will apply those skills or if he will discover his own path.

The cast is brilliant.  I have yet to see Carmichael in a film where I wasn’t impressed with his performance.  There is a rather limited range of roles for which I believe he would be suitable, but he owns that of a certain kind of innocent who is slightly vulnerable. 

On the other end of a kind of spectrum is Sim, relishing his work with a kind of diabolical glee.  As always, his performance is a mix of gestures broadly theatrical and others which are so slight as to be almost subliminal.  The latter is employed in such moments as the newly arrived Carmichael asking the dean if he is Mr. Potter, and there is a fleeing expression of doubt like, “Is that the name I’ve been using for this scam?”  Only this isn’t exactly a scam, and the professor even accommodates his prize student on the field work deemed necessary for graduation.  I have to think the actor enjoyed the moment where he hands Carmichael his diploma, concluding the ceremony by gently whacking him in the head with his mortarboard. 

Terry-Thomas turns in a performance similar to that of Sim’s, as this is the type of role in which he excels.  He got a huge laugh from me when he jumps on the back of a double-decker and yells, “Follow that bus!”  UK film staple John Le Mesurier convincingly plays a head waiter who will accept a bribe and still not give you a table. Carmichael’s fellow students at the university include Jeremy Lloyd, Monte Landis, Gerald Campion—all minor comedic character actors, but who are enjoyable in parts such as these in which they specialized.  Lloyd, in particular, always reminds me a bit of a young Graham Chapman, and his characters always appears ready to appear in Python’s “Upperclass Twit of the Year” sketch.  

Then there are Dennis Price and Peter Jones as astonishingly bold salesmen of used cars, who manage to sell our hero a vehicle of such age and bewildering appearance as to appear to be assembled from many objects, some of which may not have originated from automobiles.  The horn is a long tube that ends in the head of a snake.  I suspect the engine, from which many pipes run down the length of the body, might be steam-powered.  Terry-Thomas makes the bizarre speculation when seeing it that it “looks like a Polish stomach pump.”  The salesmen make such bizarre claims as “the company went out of business because they were too good.”  They reminded me a bit of the pair of conniving rats in Chicken Run who think they are masters of the con, only to be conned themselves.  It is no surprise a similar thing happens here.

One would think Janette Scott would have a stellar part here, as the object of the passive-aggressive feud between Carmichael and Terry-Thomas, yet she is given very little to do.  Largely, it is what other characters say about her, even when she’s offscreen, which give her character seem more substantial than her actual screen presence.  For example, when Carmichael tries tell Sim about her, he fails to even describe her hair color, leading the dean to say, “Tell me more about this not-quite-blonde.”  I think it would be awesome if 90’s one-hit-wonders Four Non Blondes found inspiration for their name from his picture, but I highly doubt it.

School for Scoundrels is very enjoyable, though I was increasingly on edge to see if it would stick the landing.  Carmichael is right to learn to stand up for himself, but will he transcend the mindset of the titular school and learn to approach Scott as a fellow human being deserving of respect?  In a way, the movie could be remade today to be far more cynical and it wouldn’t be unfair to title it School for Incels.  If I was Carmichael, I would have completely walked away from a woman who is so easily and thoroughly impressed by Terry-Thomas’s puffery and greasy charm.  Returning to my earlier analogies, it may be better to stay on the porch and not bother running with the big dogs, as the view only ever changes for the one in the lead.  Come to think of it, the view also never changes for anybody but the lead segment in a human centipede, and I nobody would want to be part of that, even the lead segment.

Dir: Robert Hamer

Starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Janette Scott, Alastair Sim

Watched as part of the Film Movement blu-ray box set Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter