Shown on television more or less 60 years after its initial release this holds up remarkably well in contrast to Brighton Rock made one year earlier with the same leading man and the other twin director brother at the helm. Perhaps it is because The Guinea Pig presents Britain in a positive rather than a negative light or, to put it another way, perhaps we can feel nostalgia for an IDEA of a lost Britain rather than an actual one. Dickie Attenborough then 23 and already married for three years (to Sheila Sim, who marries Robert Fleyming here) 'got away' with playing the working class schoolboy awarded a scholarship to a Public school as a 'socialist' experiment and part of the enjoyment is watching the traditional 'values' of that lost England reflected in the prism of the Public school as they had been in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and would be again in The Browning Version though all three films had a different focus. Today when ANY form of education is anathema to the Blairites it's difficult if a film like this would last five minutes should anyone be foolish enough to produce and screen one but as long as Channel 4 is prepared to air this type of movie we can bask in its core values for an hour or so even as the barbarians are at the gate.
Review of The Outsider
