BOYS IN BROWN: rising stars take a wrong turn

This 1949 British crime drama is as uninspired as it's title.
It focuses on a bunch of unfeasibly well-spoken, slightly over-age teenage troublemakers doing time at an implausibly cuddly and cosy borstal for a variety of minor crimes.

If BOYS IN BROWN is to be believed, the British borstal system of the mid 20th century was akin to the British boarding school system minus the homosexuality (although Dirk Bogarde's character is suspiciously softly spoken). Neither were particularly welcoming institutions but if you knuckled down and followed the rules they'd both make a man of you.
Writer-director Montgomery Tully operates under the illusion that he's making a message movie about youth and society, and how the latter must act humanely if it is to keep the former from falling into a life of crime. But the script is so simplistic and the actors so ill-suited for the parts they're playing that the whole thing comes off as a seriously misguided and patronising attempt by  well-meaning middle class do-gooders to tell the lower classes just what's best for them. These boys have done bad things but they're not bad, just a little misguided, and if they'll only listen to the kind hearted liberal governor of the borstal (Jack Warner) everything will turn out ok.
Richard Attenborough's character, Jackie Knowles, is the primary recipent of this benificence. He's got his mum (Thora Hird) and his girl (Barbara Murray) waiting for him on the outside and he doesn't want to let them down again. It can be tough on the inside, resisting the peer pressure from the likes of Alfie (Bogarde), Bill (Jimmy Hanley) and 'Sparrow' (Michael Medwin) but if he just follows the pearls of wisdom in the Governor's lectures he'll be ok. Jackie is a variation on Attenborough's 'Pinkie' in 'Brighton Rock' made 2 years earlier, but minus any depth of character. Bogarde's inexplicably Welsh accented Alfie is so delicate it's impossible to imagine what crime he could have committed to get himself sent to borstal, while Hanley, Medwin and the rest of the gang look and sound like over grown grammar school boys slumming it.
The miscasting is really not the fault of the actors. They were all signed to contracts with studios like Rank and Gainsborough and told what parts to play. Everyone involved in BOYS IN BROWN would go on to bigger and better things, and the kindest way to look on this film is as a training ground for some genuinely talented actors.