Term of Trial (Romulus, Warner Bros., 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 8) my husband Charles and I watched a Warner Archive DVD (essentially a home-burned DVD-ROM, though from a major studio, with chapter stops only every 10 minutes instead of being cued to the contents of the film) of a 1962 British production called Term of Trial. Term of Trial, written and directed by Peter Glenville from a novel by James Barlow, is a British production by Romulus, distributed by Warner Bros., about Graham Weir (Laurence Olivier), a schoolteacher who is teaching in a proletarian public school in Easton (a suburb of Bristol in central England) where the students are mostly incredibly rowdy and more interested in acting up and having (or seeking) sex with each other than in learning. Graham is unhappily married to Anna (Simone Signoret), a Frenchwoman whom he met shortly after World War II and brought back to Britain. We get the hint that Anna had some sort of career as an entertainer before the war and before she got hooked up with Graham, but she’s too old to resume it now. Graham is upset that his past – he was a conscientious objector during the war and served prison time for it – has kept him from the more lucrative teaching jobs at private schools. So he takes his frustrations out by drinking a lot, mostly in pubs on his way home from work, though (contrary to the Wikipedia posts on both Barlow’s novel and Glenville’s film) he doesn’t really qualify as an alcoholic. He runs afoul of two students in particular: Mitchell (Terence Stamp, who made this film just before actor-director Peter Ustinov cast him in the title role of his 1962 film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, his star-making role), a thug-like lout who bullies his classmates and sneaks a camera through the window of the girls’ restroom so he can take dirty pictures of them without their knowledge; and Shirley Taylor (Sarah Miles).

Shirley comes from a working-class home whose parents (Norman Bird and Barbara Ferris) are hostile to her career ambitions, such as they are, because her big hope is to get into secretarial school and learn not only to type and take dictation but also speak in a higher-end form of English. To achieve all this, she sets her cap for Graham and seeks his help not only in legitimate ways, like placing her in a night-school class and setting up private tutoring sessions for her, but also in not-so-legitimate ones. The official synopsis on imdb.com reads, “A British high-school girl becomes infatuated with her English teacher, but after he rejects her amorous advances, she goes to the police and accuses him of indecent assault,” but oddly that plot line takes place only during the last third or so of this two-hour movie. The alleged assault took place while Graham, two other teachers, and 15 students were on a field trip to Europe, and Graham was leading five students on a tour of Paris. Shirley either feels faint while the tour group is visiting the Louvre (naturally we get a nice close-up of the Mona Lisa in situ and without the elaborate security precautions that surround it today) or pretends to so Graham will take her on their own to see the Eiffel Tower and other historic Parisian locations. (The Eiffel Tower’s elevator is built in and runs from a car shaped like a parallelogram that ascends and descends at an angle based on the structure’s incline. Inevitably it reminded me of the Angels’ Flight in Los Angeles, another favorite location of moviemakers.) Before then we see a lot of rather dreary scenes between Graham and Anna, and between Graham and headmaster Ferguson (Frank Pettingell, who played Sir John Falstaff in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings, a presentation of William Shakespeare’s history plays from Richard II to Richard III that told the story of the Wars of the Roses; alas, Pettingell was terrible in the role, insufferably hammy and overacted, though as I’ve said before, one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th century was that no one ever thought to cast W. C. Fields as Falstaff: he would have been ideal!).

We also see a scene in which Mitchell and three of his equally rowdy buddies corner Shirley in a vacant lot and look like they’re about to gang-rape her, though they decide not to and figure they’ve fought back enough just by scaring her with that prospect rather than actually going through with it. Shirley had “earned” that fate by turning down a date with Mitchell and telling him he disgusted her, and threatening her with sexual assault was his way of getting back at her. Ultimately Shirley and Graham end up together in Graham’s hotel room in London (a mix-up in their train reservations have stranded them there for a night before they can return to Easton), after Shirley has gone there wearing just a slip under her overcoat. Presumably she’s there to lose her virginity to the teacher she for some reason has formed a crush on, and he gives her a glass of water which she, frightened by a thunderclap, immediately drops and lets shatter. Writer/director Glenville keeps the staging of this scene ambiguous, letting us decide for ourselves whether Graham is improperly interested in deflowering Shirley or just wants to turn down her advance in a polite way. They get as far as kissing each other before he sends her on her way, gives her a pat on the behind, and sends her back to her room in the hotel. When all the principals return to Easton, Graham finds himself being visited by a police official, Detective Sergeant Kiernan (Dudley Foster), who informs him that Shirley (or, rather, her mother) has filed charges against him for indecent conduct. Graham is scared shitless of not only going to prison (again) but, even if he isn’t incarcerated, losing his ability to work as a teacher. He’s also afraid that his wife Anna (ya remember Anna?) will divorce him. After a scene in which Graham is arrested and taken to a police station, where he’s grilled in a rather dowdy-looking interrogation room, the trial takes place before three judges instead of a jury.

The main witnesses against Graham are Shirley and her mother, and though Graham’s attorney does a seemingly good job of cross-examining Shirley, ultimately the judges find against Graham and sentence him to probation. Then [spoiler alert!] Shirley speaks up in court and declares that everything she said on the witness stand was a lie and Graham was totally gentlemanly towards her; she said it was only under the influence of her mom that she lied on the stand. Graham walks through the streets of Easton and sees a great variety of sexually explicit literature and toys for sale openly in shop windows – a great scene that shows how sheltered Graham has been from the sexual dark side ¬– and also buys a gun which he apparently intends to use to kill himself if his career is ruined. Graham meets with Ferguson and learns that the scandal has cost him the promotion to assistant headmaster he was hoping for. Ferguson tells Graham point-blank that, though he’s not firing Graham, he thinks it would be better for the school and the community if Graham resigned and sought a teaching job somewhere else. Graham refuses and says he’ll serve out at least the rest of the current school term in Easton. Then Graham returns home to Anna (once again, ya remember Anna?) and sees the gun he bought on their table. For a moment I thought Glenville and Barlow had had Anna kill herself over her husband’s shame the way Simone Signoret’s character had done in a much finer and better-known film, Room at the Top (1959), but no-o-o-o-o. Instead she’s still alive but has packed her bags and left, until in the film’s most twisted scene [double spoiler alert!] Graham realizes that the only way he can hold on to his wife is by telling her that Shirley’s testimony was right the first time and wrong the second: he really did attempt to seduce Shirley in that hotel room. For some reason, this leads Anne to decide that her husband is butch enough after all for her to remain with him and keep trying to make the marriage work.

Though I didn’t watch it that way, I first heard of Term of Trial when Eddie Muller showed it on his “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies even though it’s not really a film noir. Instead, more than anything, it’s an example of the so-called “kitchen-sink dramas” popular in British cinema in those days about the nastier, grungier, more proletarian aspects of British life. Laurence Olivier was aware enough of the changing market he decided that, rather than trying to beat the kitchen-sink boys at their own game, he’d join them. He commissioned one of Britain’s “angry young man” playwrights, John Osborne, to write a play for him called The Entertainer, in which he’d star as an over-the-hill entertainer unable to come to grips with the way both the entertainment world and real life had passed him by. Olivier also ended up marrying Joan Plowright, who played his daughter in The Entertainer. Term of Trial was yet another attempt by the now middle-aged Olivier to keep up with the times, and he’s quite good in a nondescript milquetoast way as a man embittered by his own disappointments in life. Charles said the story reminded him of The Police’s song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” also about a nubile young female student cruising a married male teacher twice her age and the teacher’s guilt feelings about their relationship, specifically his attraction to her versus his awareness of both the legal and moral jeopardy of following through on it.