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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1950s
    Movies - 1950s Movies - P 2 Mins Read

    Private’s Progress (1956)

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    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.

    privatesprogress9Stanley’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

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