Term of Trial

I hadn't really intended to do reviews on two movies with Terence Stamp in them in close proximity, but then Modesty Blaise showed up in the FXM rotation. But in going through the backlog of movies on my YoutubeTV cloud DVR, I got up to another movie that also happens to have Terence Stamp in a supporting role: Term of Trial.

The star here is Laurence Olivier. He plays Graham Weir, who is a teacher who doesn't have the best of personal lives. He's married to Anna (Simone Signoret) in a marriage that's become loveless in part because she apparently can't bear him any children. Graham has dealt with this by turning to the drink. He's also got a lot of the tropes of school movies whether British like Violent Playground or American like Blackboard Jungle; notably this includes the juvenile delinquent type like Mitchell (that's 23-year-old Terence Stamp playing high school-aged).

Also in his class is Shirley Taylor (Sarah Miles), a nice young girl of working-class parents who wants to get ahead and go to "night school", after-school catch-up classes for students who think they need remedial education. But since the current term is halfway done, her signing up for that might not work out so well. So she gets the idea that perhaps Mr. Weir can come to her house and help her out one-on-one, which you get was her intention all along. After all, students having a crush on their teachers has also always been a staple of movies set in high school. Much complicating matters is that Mitchell thinks Shirley should be his girl.

Meanwhile, there's the faculty-related stuff going on. Mr. Sylvan-Jones (Allan Cuthbertson), the current deputy headmaster, is taking on a new position elsewhere at the end of term, so a promotion to deputy headmaster is up, as the headmaster tells everybody in an assembly. Graham might be good in that job, but there's that personal life, which includes being a conscientious objector during World War II. Also at the assembly, the headmaster announces that there are going to be two field trips to the Continent during the Easter recess. Weir's class is going to be heading off to Paris.

This gives Shirley the chance to put the moves on Weir even more, as it becomes clearer that she's got a crush on him. It goes so far as to feign a fainting spell in the Louvre in order to get some time alone with Weir, and then showing up at his hotel room after everybody has ostensibly gone to bed. But when Graham figures out what's going wrong and tries to put a stop to it, Shirley decides to intimate that Graham was the one doing untoward things, leading to the titular trial.

Despite all the tropes, Term of Trial is actually a pretty darn good movie. Part of this is due to the presence of Laurence Olivier, who unsurprisingly gives a fine performance. But another part of it comes from being adjacent to the British "kitchen sink" movies of the early 1960s. There's something about the production values here that seems so much grittier than we could get from Hollywood movies of the era.

So if you get the chance, definitely give Term of Trial a watch. One note, however: Wikipedia and IMDb both list it as having a 130-minute running time, while the print TCM ran is only 114 minutes.