Where There’s a Will *** (1936, Will Hay, Graham Moffatt, H F Maltby) – Classic Movie Review 1866

Co-writer/director William Beaudine’s 1936 comedy stars Will Hay as an incompetent, blundering solicitor called Benjamin Stubbins, who is unwittingly duped by an American crook called Duke Wilson (played by Hartley Power) into allowing his office to be used to drill through to the bank below for a bank robbery. Where There’s a Will was made just before Hay hit his peak form, accounting for an uneven but appealing result, in which some careless, over-broad comedy mixes with many riotously funny sequences.

Hay’s regular partner in crime Graham Moffatt co-stars as Willie the Office Boy, but alas there’s no Moore Marriott to complete the comedy trio. And most of the funniest bits are when Moffatt shares the screen.

The gem moments in the film include a drunk scene with Gibb McLaughlin as the sepulchral butler Martin and the sequence with the police singing carols at Christmas, just inches away from burglars at work. The screenplay is by Hay and Beaudine, and Robert Edmunds and Ralph Spence, from a story by Leslie Arliss and Sidney Gilliat.

It is produced for Gainsborough Studios by Michael Balcon, who, it turned out, wasn’t a big fan of Will Hay’s lucrative work, thinking it too downmarket for his refined middle-class taste. When he got to Ealing Studios, he produced classier, more ambitious work, notably the Ealing comedies. Although, great though they are, that doesn’t mean his attitude to Hay and his comedies is right at all.

Director Vernon Sewell’s British 1955 comedy for the Eros company has the same title to the 1936 Will Hay comedy but otherwise no connection. A London Cockney family inherits a tumbledown English West Country farm in a will, and the father (Leslie Dwyer) sets out to Devon to refurbish the building with the help of his reluctant family and housekeeper Kathleen Harrison.

Sewell’s entertainment is gentle, quite sweet and always mildly enjoyable. Familiar stars Harrison, Dwyer, George Cole, Edward Lexy, Dandy Nichols (TV’s Till Death Us Do Part), Michael Shepley, Philip Ray and Sam Kydd brighten up the comedy in R F Delderfield’s somewhat too easy-going, sappy script, adapted from his own play. Edward Woodward plays Ralph Stokes, in his first film.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1866

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