Sports Day (film)

Sports Day (alternative title, The Colonel's Cup)
Directed by	Francis Searle
Produced by	Mary Field and Bruce Woolf for GBI - Gaumont British Instruction, School programmes and educational films
Starring	Peter Jeffrey Roy Russell Jean Simmons
Release date	1945
Running time	short
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Sports day is a 1945 short film <ref. bfi.org [1]</ref> , directed by Francis Searle for Gaumont British Instruction. It featured an early appearance of Jean Simmons.

Synopsis

A schoolboy who almost misses the school sports day when he is wrongly punished for cruelty to a dog.

Cast

• Peggy Jean Simmons
• Tom Peter Jeffrey
• Col.House Roy Russell
• Headmaster Ernest Borrow
• Bill David Anthony

Notes

Francis Searle, the director, during the war was with Gaumont British Screen Services and Gaumont-British Instruction for seven years. Interviewed in 1995 - "We were put on the reserved list and seconded to the Army , Navy and Air Force for training films , in conjunction with the MoI - we made films like Citizens Advice Bureau, and Sam Pepys joins the Navy, Hospital Nurse. " In the interview he decribes how he came to work with Jean Simmons.

“I also worked at Merton Park with Jean Simmons , who I cast in a short picture. Mary Field and Bruce Woolf were the bosses at GBI. ( Gaumont British Instruction). Mary Field did childrens films and she had a film she offered to me (Sports Day 1945) – Aida Foster, who was a big agent for juveniles, set up an audition and Jean, aged about 14, came on as bright as a button; she had learned the part and that was it. I didn’t bother looking at any of the others.'