Michael Redgrave gives his greatest performance as Andrew Crocker-Harris, a boarding-school teacher who realizes that his life may be a failure. Anthony Asquith’s The Browning Version was a Terence Rattigan play scripted for the screen by Rattigan. Michael Redgrave, who along with Rattigan won an award at the Cannes Film Festival for his involvement in the 1951 film.

Andrew Crocker-Harris, "The Crock" as his students call him who is an unpopular Classics Master disliked by the staff and most of the students alike who have also given him the nickname of Himmler. Crocker-Harris has been teaching at this public school for eighteen years is forced  into retirement owing to ill-health. Lack of success with his pupils has blighted his youthful ambition to be the Head, a promise he had made to his now embittered wife Millie who also learns he will get no pension.

The tragedy is that neither can satisfy the other's needs. Millie has been seeking consolation in an affair with Hunter, the chemistry master. Andrew finds his protective armour of indifference and lovelessness pierced by an act of kindness by one of his students, Taplow who he has be giving private tuition, gives him a second-hand copy of Browning's translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, inscribing it: "God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master." Harris weeps, as he realises that he has never imparted to students his own love of the classics in his teaching. His marital problems are brought to a head when Millie's spiteful attempt to destroy the value of this gift in Andrew's eyes pretending the gift was only a piece of flattery calculated to evade a punishment. In the last few minutes before he leaves, Andrew makes an unexpected gesture of defiance towards the Headmaster who has constantly humiliated him, and finds in the applause that greets his frank apology for his failings to the assembled school, the courage to face a new life without his unfaithful wife who has also been cast off by her lover Hunter, the chemistry master.

The film's rich montage of incident on the last few days of term and character detail builds to intense emotional heights that make this 1951 version of The Browning Version a classic.

DVD given away with The Sunday Telegraph 19th Nov 2006 runtime 89minutes B&W

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