Robin Williams is the making of this heart-warming if admittedly improbable movie, which is a perfect showcase for his talents as a maverick English teacher at a stuffy and expensive public school in Fifties Vermont.

So incendiary are his methods - his subject is life, the English is incidental - that you wonder how teacher and school ever accepted each other in the first place.

But Williams' engaging personality is forceful enough to put it all across.

The performances are uniformly good, from Williams and his septet of poetry students to Norman Lloyd as the martinet headmaster who seeks to protect not the truth but the good name of the school.

Oscar winner for Best Writing for the screen.

Planned to be filmed at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, the film was made at St. Andrews boarding school in Delaware because it was too costly to create fake snow on the Georgia campus.