Where There’s a Will *** (1936, Will Hay, Graham Moffatt, H F Maltby) – Classic Movie Review 1,866

The 1936 British comedy film Where There’s a Will stars Will Hay as a blundering solicitor duped by an American crook into allowing his office to be used in a bank robbery.

Co-writer/ director William Beaudine’s 1936 British comedy film Where There’s a Will 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.

It is Graham Moffatt’s first appearance in a Will Hay film. Director William Beaudine’s 1936 Windbag the Sailor is the first appearance of Hay with both Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott, but both of them had already acted separately in films starring Hay, Moffatt in Where There’s a Will and Marriott in Dandy Dick.

The cast are: Will Hay as Benjamin Stubbins, Graham Moffatt as Willie the office boy, Norma Varden as Lady Margaret Wimpleton, Hartley Power as Duke Wilson, Gina Malo as Goldie Kelly, H F Maltby as Sir Roger Wimpleton, Peggy Simpson as Barbara Stubbins, Gibb McLaughlin as Martin, Eddie Houghton as ‘Slug’, Hal Waters as ‘Nick’, John Turnbull as Detective Collins, Sybil Brooke as the Landlady, Davina Craig as ‘Lucie’, Mickey Brantford as ‘Jimmy’, Henry Adnes as the Pawnbroker and Frederick Piper as a Fingerprint expert.

Release date: 10 August 1936.

It is edited by later Hammer Films director Terence Fisher.

Where There’s a Will (1955)

Edward Woodward plays Ralph Stokes, in his first film.

Director Vernon Sewell’s British 1955 comedy film Where There’s a Will 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 1,866

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