Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL

It's Great To Be Young! has a fair claim to be not only one of Britain's first teenage musicals but also one of the most commercially successful of any musical made in Britain during the 1950s - it proved so popular that it allegedly caused riots in Singapore. Its virtues are those of many ABPC productions of its era, from the vibrant Eastmancolor cinematography to the immaculately-selected cast and even if some of the sixth-formers are aged in their twenties, they do sound convincing as teenagers.

At the time, Jeremy Spenser was being modelled as ABPC's young leading man of choice; further down the cast list are the already close-to-ubiquitous Richard O'Sullivan and Carole Shelley, a decade before she appeared alongside Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple (US, 1967). Meanwhile, Cecil Parker gives the film's most nuanced performance as a headmaster who is far more vulnerable than his austere appearance would suggest. By contrast, John Mills seems a decade too old to play Dingle, and his faintly selfish, happy-go-lucky persona is ultimately far less sympathetic than the stern but sincere Mr. Frome.

Also characteristic of ABPC were the use of very American-sounding musical numbers and a stolid director in the form of Cyril Frankel; if the film does have an auteur it is Ted Willis, who wrote a screenplay that contains more than its fair share of verbal felicities. But above all, It's Great to Be Young! was quite a revelation at a time when British films tended to characterise teenagers as little other than delinquent, as in 1952's Cosh Boy (d. Lewis Gilbert) or the same year's I Believe in You (d. Basil Dearden). In place of the monochrome vision of side-boarded cosh boys mooching among the bombsites, It's Great To Be Young! presents a vision of jolly, Welfare State-fed youth in a state grammar school where summer seems to be almost endless and where the head girl mimes to Ruby Murray singing 'You Are My First Love'. How utterly wizard!

Andrew Roberts

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