Raising the Wind (1961 film)

Raising the Wind
Directed by Gerald Thomas
Produced by Peter Rogers
Written by Bruce Montgomery
Starring James Robertson Justice
Leslie Phillips
Kenneth Williams
Music by Edmund Crispin
Cinematography Alan Hume
Distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated
Release date
 1961 (1961)
Running time
 91 minutes
Country United Kingdom
Language English

Raising the Wind is a 1961 British comedy film written by Bruce Montgomery and directed by Gerald Thomas. It starred James Robertson Justice, Leslie Phillips, Kenneth Williams, Liz Fraser, Eric Barker and Sid James. It is set in an elite music school.

Raising the Wind uses a cast of actors drawn from the Carry On and Doctor films that were popular at the time, although it is not an official member of either series.

Synopsis

Mervyn, Malcolm, Harold, Miranda and Jill are music students at a London music school, the (fictional) London Academy of Music and the Arts. They decide to share a flat to pool their meagre grants and to find a place to practise. They suffer the put-downs of the acerbic Sir Benjamin Boyd, who conducts the student orchestra, and the antics of the other talented but eccentric teachers at the school.

To raise some much-needed funds, the group offer to play a string quintet recital, but it's a disaster, with instrument strings breaking all the time. More successfully, they play in several performances of Handel's Messiah.

Mervyn, a talented composer, writes a catchy tune and whilst drunk sells it for fifty pounds to Sid and Harry, advertising copywriters. Sober the next day, he realises that he has violated the terms of his grant; the two offer to sell it back to him for five hundred pounds, money he can't possibly raise. He then learns that the tune is an existing one (which he probably heard somewhere) and copyrighted, so the composer could theoretically sue the purchasers.

Some of the students go up for a prestigious scholarship, which includes conducting a professional orchestra. Mervyn makes a reasonable effort with music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but the supercilious know-it-all Harold annoys the musicians with constant criticism and they have their own back on him, with a disastrous rendition of Rossini's William Tell Overture.

To everyone's surprise, the scholarship is awarded to Miranda, but she confesses that she only wants to marry fellow student Mervyn.

Trivia

  • The exterior of the music school is filmed at University College London, which also doubled for St Swithin's hospital in several of the 'Doctor' films.

Cast


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