St Trinian's | 2007
The revisit to Ronald Searle’s anarchic learning academy for young ladies is not exactly a timeless classic, but it’s easygoing fun, Rupert Everett is perfect casting – and way ahead of the gruesome 70s Wildcats of St Trinian’s film.
‘St Trinian’s’ itself is Park Place, Remenham, near Henley-on-Thames. The Grade-II house, which really did used to be a boarding school, was sold after filming for an eye-watering £42million – the record for a UK house outside London. It was previously used for hospital scenes in Atonement. A private home set in a large estate, there’s not much to see unless the owners have invited you over for sherry.
The girls plan to steal Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (one of many movie in-jokes – Colin Firth starred as Vermeer in the film of The Girl With a Pearl Earring) from London’s famous National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
You’ll be disappointed if you visit to see the painting. Vermeer’s masterpiece isn’t in the National Gallery at all. It’s not even in the UK. If you want to see the real thing, you need to visit the Mauritshuis gallery in the Hague, the Netherlands.
It won’t come as a surprise to know that, although the National Gallery exterior is the real deal, the interiors filmed elsewhere. The gallery interior is Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, Dulwich, south London, which houses one of the world's most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s.
And the wing in which the final of School Challenge takes place is yet a different location. Back in central London, it’s the Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall, which you can also see in Bond movie Die Another Day, Guy Ritchie’s 2009 revamp of Sherlock Holmes, the 2001 remake of The Four Feathers with Heath Ledger, Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic O Lucky Man! and Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty.
