DEATH GOES TO SCHOOL

UK, 1953, 61 minutes, Black and white.
Gordon Jackson, Barbara Murray, Pamela Alan, Jane Elliott, Beatrice Varley, Sam Kydd.
Directed by Stephen Clarkson.

This is a short supporting feature from Britain in the early 1960s. It is quite simply, a murder mystery and a police investigation.

The setting is an all-girls school, one of the teachers being found dead. She is an unpopular woman, creating conflict amongst the staff, no one sympathetic to her. The police are called in in the form of Gordon Jackson with Sam Kydd as his assistant. There are interviews and interrogations – with a few flashbacks illustrating the aggression of the murdered woman.

This provides a variety of performances, from the businesslike headmistress concerned about the school, to a French teacher, to a young rather girlish teacher, to a bespectacled teacher who is concealing her private life, to an older teacher who has a niece in the school. However, the main attention is given to a sympathetic teacher, Barbara Murray, who provides information but also provide some leads, some of which she follows herself, in fact solving who is the murderer.

There is some background to each of the teachers and a revelation that the murdered woman was having an affair with the father of one of the girls in the school.

Old-fashioned in its way, but still a popular format, and easy hours crime entertainment.