History Film / StTrinians

** The first film starts with Virginia Fritton, the headmistress' niece, having been ''expelled'' from St. Trinian's for burning down a building. As tolerant as headmistress Fritton is, she has to draw the limit to burning down school buildings, especially ''uninsured'' ones, and the only reason Virginia is readmitted is that the school is desperate for money and her back fees will help with it.

''St. Trinian's'' is a film series based on a series of cartoons by Ronald Searle (also known for ''Literature/{{Molesworth}}'' and ''Dick Deadeye, or Duty Done''). The setting is a [[BoardingSchoolOfHorrors disreputable girls' school]], where the only rule is that there are no rules. The girls themselves are teen and pre-teen horrors who are not above using their feminine wiles to get away with murder. The teachers? They teach the girls how to get away with crime in foreign countries, and mixing drinks. The headmistress, Miss Fritton, has no interest in maintaining any form of order. And there is a local spiv, Flash Harry, who makes money from whatever schemes the girls cook up (usually).

'''''St. Trinian's''''' is a film series based on a series of cartoons by Ronald Searle (also known for ''Literature/{{Molesworth}}'' and ''Dick Deadeye, or Duty Done''). The setting is a [[BoardingSchoolOfHorrors disreputable girls' school]], where the only rule is that there are no rules. The girls themselves are teen and pre-teen horrors who are not above using their feminine wiles to get away with murder. The teachers? They teach the girls how to get away with crime in foreign countries, and mixing drinks. The headmistress, Miss Fritton, has no interest in maintaining any form of order. And there is a local spiv, Flash Harry, who makes money from whatever schemes the girls cook up (usually).

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: St. Trinian's may be an independent school, thus having less government supervision than a state-funded one, but the girls' antics are bad enough that the Ministry of Education is constantly trying to shut them down, coming ''really'' close to succeed in both ''The Pure Hell of St. Trinian's'' and ''The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery''.

** A school with students such as St. Trinian's has a high teacher turnout rate: in the first movie the school lacks many teachers and is said to be constantly looking for new ones, at the start of ''Blue Murder at St. Trinian's'' the teachers have left after the students locked away Mrs. Fritton, and at the start of ''The Pure Hell of St. Trinian's'' there's no staff at all.

* CorruptTheCutie: The school has an unsettling ability to turn normal new students from other schools into proper St. Trinian's girls, such as with princess Fatima in ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'', Annabelle Fritton in the 2007 movie, and Angela Hall in ''The Wildcats of St. Trinian's''... And Angela had been ''kidnapped from her actual school'' by the St. Trinian's students.

* CatholicSchoolgirlsRule: St. Trinian's isn't Catholic but the trope still applies ("St. Trinian's Girl" is the British name for this trope, and the 2007 movie provides the trope image).

* SexySchoolwoman: Some of the senior girls, particularly in the reboot film (emphasized by the fact the vast majority of the cast [[invoked]][[DawsonCasting were in their 20s]]).

* UncannyFamilyResemblance: in both the original film and the reboot. In ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'', Millicent and Clarence Fritton were both played by Creator/AlastairSim. In the reboot film, Camilla and Carnaby Fritton were both played by Rupert Everett.

* CustomUniformOfSexy: In most English boarding schools, younger students are expected to abide by the dress code, whereas older students have a bit more liberty. In Real Life, this "liberty" usually amounts to older students ditching their ugly berets or hemming their skirts a tiny bit higher than regulation, but an old in-joke is that by the time a student reaches top form, they're barely wearing a uniform at all, and that the older the girl, the more figure-flattering her uniform becomes. Since St. Trinian's is already a wild exaggeration of schoolgirl stereotypes, the Trinian sixth-formers take this trope UpToEleven, with uniforms verging on {{Stripperiffic}}.

* CatholicSchoolgirlsRule: St. Trinian's isn't Catholic but the trope still applies ("St. Trinian's Girl" is the British name for this trope).

-->-- '''Music/GirlsAloud''', ''St. Trinian's'' (2007)

* ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'' (1954): The decrepit school is desperately in need of some money, so Miss Fritton ([[Film/Scrooge1951 Alistair Sim]]) allows the girls to place bets on a horserace. Things quickly get out of hand when the classes place bets on rival horses.

* CrossCastRole: Alistair Sim as the headmistress.

* UncannyFamilyResemblance: in both the original film and the reboot. In ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'', Millicent and Clarence Fritton were both played by Alastair Sim. In the reboot film, Camilla and Carnaby Fritton were both played by Rupert Everett.

!!The ''St. Trinian's'' (2007) film includes the following tropes:
* AccidentalAthlete: Annabelle Fritton is recruited for the hockey team after she smashes a bust with a mobile phone she belted with a hockey stick.
* AdultsAreUseless: Invoked ''and'' averted; While the girls do say that "No use relying on the grown-ups. We need to sort this out ourselves," Miss Fritton participates fully in planning and performing the heist.
* BeautifulAllAlong: Annabelle's rapid-fire montage of makeovers twists and subverts this trope before ending in a standard expression that puts her in Posh Totty territory.
* BlackComedyRape: Implied when Geoffrey Thwaites has a drink with his old lover, Miss Fritton, and passes out due to a combination of the alcohol and unspecified prescription medication. He then wakes up naked in her bed the next morning to her euphemistic implications.
* BriefAccentImitation: Flash Harry briefly disguises himself as a German art collector...with a hilariously awful accent.
* CelebrityParadox: When looking at ''The Girl With A Pearl Earring'', one girl comments that Creator/ColinFirth (who plays Geoffrey) was justified in [[Film/GirlWithAPearlEarring wanting to shag her]].
* CliqueTour: New girl Annabelle is shown the boarding school cliques in the dormitories. She is introduced to the chavs (loudmouthed, brash girls), the posh totties (fashionable social-climbers), the geeks, the emos, and the first-years.
* CloudCuckoolander: The receptionist, Beverly. It's implied that this is partially because she's often very, very high.
* ContinuityReboot: The 2007 film borrows plot elements of ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'' and isn't explicitly linked to the previous six films.
* CorruptTheCutie:
** Annabel Fritton starts out as a NaiveNewcomer who ends up becoming a fully fledged St. Trinian's girl towards the end of the film.
** Miss Dickinson remains fairly kind hearted and eager to teach, she just learns how to get them interested on a more St. Trinian's level.
* CrossCastRole: Creator/RupertEverett as the headmistress Miss Fritton.
* CustomUniform: Due to the [[{{Understatement}} rather relaxed]] rules at St. Trinian's, all the girls wear custom uniforms apart from Annabel at first. Averted for laughs in one scene, where instead of scolding a student for dangling a girl off of the stairs, a teacher demands that she tuck her shirt in.
* DancePartyEnding: With Music/GirlsAloud, no less.
* FamousNamedForeigner: There is a French teacher called Miss [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maupassant Maupassant]]
* FeigningIntelligence: Done as part of a GambitRoulette when the girls partake in a nation-wide quiz to find the smartest school in Britain. They use increasingly underhanded tactics to win each round (including sleeping with the other contestants and drugging one unfortunate team) and use the Internet to look up the answers, which are then relayed to the girls on stage. It does help that they know some of the answers.
* FilleFatale: The Posh Totties run a phone-sex operation.
* FingerInTheMail: [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] while they are pondering how to find the money to save the school. Flash dismisses it as "too medieval", though.
* GargleBlaster: The vodka some of the girls distill is labelled "100% proof". It's powerful enough that a tiny taste makes Geoffrey quite drunk for a few minutes, and a shot glass full of it is powerful enough to knock a Russian girl unconscious. Previous versions apparently made people go blind and may have killed a woman.
* GoneSwimmingClothesStolen: The girls band together to effect this trope on new girl Annabelle Fritton as she showers, filming the resulting nekkid antics on hidden cameras and broadcasting it on Website/YouTube.
* LaserHallway: This film gives about every heist movie trope in the space of thirty minutes, which means that the girls have to negotiate one of these en route to stealing the ''Girl with a Pearl Earring''.
* LowerClassLout: One of the cliques is known as The Chavs.
* MadBomber: The explosive-mad twins.
* MythologyGag: Several taken from the older films;
** The bust that Annabelle shatters is of Alistair Sim, the actor who portrayed Miss Fritton in the earlier films.
** Similarly, the painting in Miss Fritton's office is also of Sim.
** The animated heist plan mimics the artistic style of Ronald Searle, whose cartoons inspired the films.
** The uniforms the Posh Totties wear to the School Challenge are based on the uniforms from the earlier films.
** On the way to the School Challenge final, the camera lingers on the visible tops of Annabelle's stockings. The fact that the girls wore this style in the 50s movies was seen as shocking and scandalous.
** A deleted scene has a ministry official suggest "Let Those Wildcats Beware" as a news headline for the Minister's plan to make St. Trinian's an example; this is a reference to ''Wildcats of St. Trinian's''. Thwaite shoots it down as stupid, which may itself be a reference to how bad ''Wildcats'' was.
** At least one of the pictures the camera pans over in the Art Room is based on one of the original Searle drawings (The original caption to which is "...And this is Rachel, our Head girl.")
* NaiveNewcomer:
** Annabelle when she first shows up at school and comes around to being a full fledged St. Trinian's girl by the time the first half of the movie is over.
** Miss Dickinson is the new English teacher and she's completely overwhelmed on her first day. She appears to have gotten a decent grasp of what's going on by the time the film ends.
* NeverFoundTheBody: Miss Dickinson comments that they have lost "four English teachers in six months," prompting Ms Fritton to observe: "Very careless of us. I expect they'll turn up."
* OpenTheDoorAndSeeAllThePeople: Reporters and paparazzi are at the school and Colin Firth's character just happens to stands nude at the window of the headmistress' room.
* PowerWalk: The girls do this after having successfully pulled off their heist.
* ShoutOut:
** ''Pride and Prejudice'' gets ''a lot'':
*** Many of the cast have some connection to ''P&P'': Colin Firth was Mr. Darcy and Anna Chancellor (Miss Bagstock) was Miss Bingley in the 1995 miniseries; Talulah Riley (Annabelle) was Mary Bennet in the 2005 film version; and Gemma Arterton (Kelly) was Elizabeth Bennet in the 2008 miniseries ''Series/LostInAusten''.
*** Miss Fritton's dog is named for Mr. Darcy. This becomes distinctly "meta" in that the dog is kicked out the window while attempting to hump the Education Minister's leg - even Mr Darcy wants Colin Firth!
*** Colin Firth's slow-motion walk to the hockey field in wet white shirt with his jacket over his arm mimics a similar scene he did in ''Series/PrideAndPrejudice1995''.
*** The quizmaster's question "What book was originally titled ''First Impressions''?" references the original title of ''Pride and Prejudice''.
** Similarly, there are a number of shoutouts surrounding "The Girl With A Pearl Earring", starting with Creator/ColinFirth's role in the [[Film/GirlWithAPearlEarring 2003 film of the same name]], the explicit reference to Colin Firth wanting to shag her, and Chelsea initially thinking that the idea is to "steal Scarlett Johansson''.
** To ''Film/TheItalianJob1969'', when the twins use a little too much explosive during the heist rehearsal.
--->You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
** In her mannerisms and mode of dress, Camilla Fritton parodies Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.
** When Thwaites and Camilla meet, she says "Another time!" and he answers "Another country!" His response is the title of [[Film/AnotherCountry a 1984 film]] in which Rupert Everett and Colin Firth first starred together.
** When Annabelle is entering the school for the first time, she calls it "[[Literature/HarryPotter Hogwarts]] for [[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pikey Pikeys]]".
** A deleted scene has the girls running a Film/FightClub, which of course no one talks about.
* WritersCannotDoMath:
** ''Creator/StephenFry'' award points to a team for concluding that the volume of a sphere is πr[[superscript:3]]. A fourteen-year-old could probably tell you that it's (4πr[[superscript:3]])/3.

* SexySchoolwoman: Some of the senior girls, particularly in the reboot film (emphasized by the fact the vast majority of the cast [[DawsonCasting were in their 20s]]).

--> Maidens of St Trinians, gird your armor on\\

** In ''The Pure Hell of St. Trinian's'' an Army unit is sent to rescue the kidnapped Sixth Formers... And is quickly captured by [[PityTheKidnapper people battered due repeated failed attempts at subduing their victims]], needing to be rescued by the Fourth Formers. In their defense, [[JustifiedTrope it was a mobile bath unit, not an actual combat unit]].

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: In ''The Belles of St. Trinian's'', the girls are not a united group, but are instead acting at cross purposes. The 6th Form's actions also explicitly endanger the survival of the school, while later films have the 4th and 6th Forms form a united group and protecting the school is usually their main priority.

** In ''Blue Murder at St. Trinian's'' the Army is sent in to keep the girls contained after Miss Fritton disappears and the rest of the staff leaves. They suffer many wounded, soldiers disappear either kidnapped or deserted, and the Fourth Formers even stole a machine gun.

* CorruptTheCutie: Princess Fatima