The Goose Steps Out ***½ (1942, Will Hay, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Ustinov, Frank Pettingell, Julien Mitchell, Barry Morse, Peter Croft) – Classic Movie Review 4554

Will  Hay’s outrageous 1942 British farce is an intriguing and endearing collision between wartime morale-boosting propaganda and slapstick comedy, made at the height of World War Two. Its idea to ‘poke fun at the hun’ made it a big box office hit in Britain.

Hay once again embodies his bumbling seedy schoolmaster persona in a spy plot in which his teacher character William Potts is parachuted into Germany where he is swapped with his Nazi doppelgänger (exact double) Muller, a German spy who the British have just captured, as part of a plan to snatch a new top-secret weapon prototype from a development lab.

Peter Ustinov (aged 21, in his film debut and his only Ealing Studios film), Charles Hawtrey and Barry Morse are Krauss, Max and Kurt, most notable among the Hitler Youth pupils Hay teaches to make English rude gestures and pronounce ‘Slough’ correctly.

However, funny though it is, it was naive and dangerous, if perhaps comforting in 1942 to show the Nazis as fools in the story by Bernard Miles and Reg Groves.

It is jointly directed by Hay and Basil Dearden (in his first film as a director), is released by Associated British Pictures, runs 79 minutes, written by Angus MacPhail and John Dighton, shot by Ernest Palmer in black and white, produced by Michael Balcon and S C Balcon, scored by Bretton Byrd and designed by Tom Morahan.

Also in the cast are Frank Pettingell, Julien Mitchell, Raymond Lovell, Anne Firth, Leslie Harcourt, Barry Morse, Aubrey Mallalieu, Peter Croft, Jeremy Hawk, Lawrence O’Madden, John Williams, John Boxer, Arthur Denton, Leslie Dwyer, William Hartnell, Bryan Herbert, John Mills, Charles Paton, Jack Vyvian and H Victor Weske.

It is Hay’s last film about the Second World War. Obviously the title refers to the Nazis’ goose-step marching.

Hay dropped Hawtrey from future films for asking a bigger role.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4554

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