Private’s Progress (1956)

Upper-class innocent Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) has to interrupt his cloistered university education when he is called up in 1942 and sent to Gravestone Camp.

Stanley’s erratic and chaotic progress through the camp – and his singular lack of prowess at the military arts – almost drives his instructor (William Hartnell) to apoplexy.

He is assigned to an Officer Cadet Training Unit. but after incredible interviews with psychiatrists and others, Private Windrush is posted to a Holding Unit, under Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), terrific as the pompous officer who despairs that his men are “an absolute shower”.

He falls in with a gang of spivs and loafers including George Blake (Victor Maddern), Dai Jones (Kenneth Griffith), Horrocks (Ian Bannen) and crafty Private Cox (Richard Attenborough), who tries to teach him how to skive and scrounge – how to make a five-minute job last all day, how to slope off to the cinema without being missed, how a large number of soldiers can travel on the railway with only two tickets and an ATS hat . . .

Stanley chooses a Japanese language course as the biggest and longest “loaf” available, but is contacted by his uncle, Brigadier Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) – a “chairborne War Office hero” – to join the secret “Operation Hatrack” which, in fact, turns out to be a scam to steal looted artworks from the Germans and sell them on to crooked art dealers.

Receiving no cooperation from the War Office (because the film was thought to be harmful to recruitment), the Boulting Brothers went ahead with hilarious results. It’s a devastating satire on the ways of the British Army.

Narrator
E.V.H. Emmett
Private Stanley Windrush
Ian Carmichael
Private Percival Henry Cox
Richard Attenborough
Brigadier Bertram Tracepurcel
Dennis Price
Major Hitchcock
Terry-Thomas
Arthur Egan
Peter Jones
Sergeant Sutton
William Hartnell
Captain Henry Bootle
Thorley Walters
Prudence Greenslade
Jill Adams
Private Horrocks
Ian Bannen
Private George Blake
Victor Maddern
Private Dai Jones
Kenneth Griffith
Sergeant-Major Gradwick
John Warren
Pat
Derrick de Marney
Mr Spottiswood
Henry Longhurst
Mr Windrush Sr
Miles Malleson
Catherine
Sally Miles
Gerald
David King-Wood
Colonel Fanshawe
Michael Trubshawe
Psychiatrist
John Le Mesurier
General Tomlinson
Robert Raglan
Major Schultz
Christopher Lee
Colonel Argent
Basil Dignam
Lance Corporal Parsons
David Lodge
Sidney
Michael Ward
General Von Lembeck
Ludwig Lawinsky
Miss Sugden
Marianne Stone
Colonel Lench
Peter Stephens
Face Ache
Gerald Fox

Director
John Boulting