The Ghost of St. Michael's

I'm giving this seven out of ten, back as a kid it would have been a ten but this time round, well, I suppose you know you're getting old when you find yourself sympathising with Will Hay's incompetent teacher, and rather hoping the obnoxious, snotty school kids get a slap; Charles Hawtrey's smart alec schoolboy in particular seems a nasty piece of work. Otherwise the absence of Moffatt and Marriott are keenly felt, because they allowed Hay to be both blustery incompetence but also sarcastic - here he doesn't get anyone to be sarcastic or superior to, so it's a relatively one-note performance. In his earlier roles you never knew if he'd be the fool or the sarcy one at any given time, it kept you on your toes.

Huntley and Laurie would appear in the war movie The Way Ahead of course. Personally I'm not sure the plot machinations of St Michael's stand up. Was it Huntley's ink on the forged suicide note? What gives? Still, the ending has a few surprises and some genuinely sinister moments.

I like all of Will Hay's films, but apart from 'Oh, Mr Porter,' this is my favourite. It is jam packed with funny one-liners and comic situations and gives Hay full reign to play his seedy music hall schoolmaster. A wee gem of a film.

Will Hay is back as a hapless teacher, this time he is William Lamb, who is hired to teach on the remote Scottish Isle of Skye. Whilst there, Lamb is informed that the school is haunted by a legendary ghost and that with each sighting, and the sound of the eerie bagpipes, comes death to a member of staff.

This was Will Hay's second film for Ealing Studios and the significant leap in production quality from his Gainsborough Pictures works is very noticeable. Once again Marcel Varnel gives his tight and steady directing to a Hay picture, but the once golden team of Hay, Moffatt and Marriott had become no more. Feeling that as a trio they had gone as far as they could, Hay split the scene, leaving Moffatt and Marriott working at Gainsborough with the likes of Arthur Askey.

So in this first comedy for Ealing, Hay was effectively breaking in new comedy sidekick in the form of Claude Hulbert {Hulbert would make one other film with Hay, the darkly humorous My Learned Friend}, while Charles Hawtrey was making his third appearance of the four films he made with the erstwhile Hay. Tho the absence of Marriott and Moffatt is sorely felt, The Ghost Of St. Michael's stands up on its own two feet as a comedy of note. The writing from John Dighton and Angus MacPhail is lean and resplendent with comedic moments, whilst Ealing have really managed to capture that creepy comedy setting with John Croydon's production team on tip top form. Full of secret rooms and mysterious goings on, and even offering up a nice who done it finale, it's a film for all the family to enjoy. 8/10

I thoroughly enjoyed this Will Hay comedy, which successfully combines the school story and the requisite nod to wartime concerns with the spoof haunting theme that had featured in some of his most successful earlier work. The old team of Graham Moffat and Moore Marriott are here absent, but Hay is teamed very effectively with chinless Claude Hulbert and a young Charles Hawtrey as a precocious schoolboy. Hay's protagonist treads a skilfully effective line between annoying (we relish watching him get taken down a peg, rather than wincing) and sympathetic, while Hawtrey's gadfly-like persistence as a boy far brighter than his teachers is equally well judged, and Claude Hulbert makes ineffectuality likable.

The film has its share of broad comedy (watch for what Hay does with that piglet...) but often avoids obvious expectations, and is the funnier for it. The suspiciously Teutonic teacher is not, of course, what he seems; the ghost is, of course, not what it seems either; and the motivation which ultimately enlists the boys on the side of their erstwhile petty dictator is certainly not the type customary in school stories!

Overall "The Ghost of St Michael's" is a blend of guffaw-rich visual humour with accomplished misdirection to produce a very appropriate vehicle for its star. The beginning is a little hit and miss, but the film is still full of laugh-out-loud moments.

In his Hay-Day Will Hay seldom put a foot - or a tonsil – wrong, the Ghost Of St. Michael's was no exception, proving to be yet another classic. Set in a haunted castle on the Isle Of **** (in case Jerry wanted to know the direction to Skye) I've seen this so many times now that I find it sometimes hard to remember they were all really in Ealing's studios even though it was cheaply and simply made. Such is the power of auto-suggestion!

Because of the War an English boarding school is evacuated en masse to a castle in Scotland, of which the wild eyed porter John Laurie informs the scoffing new science master Hay and forward pupil Charles Hawtrey that it is haunted with the ghost of a phantom piper. Hay strikes up a friendship with fellow silly master Claude Hulbert, but doesn't impress the weird Head Felix Aylmer and incurs the derision of nasty senior master Raymond Huntley – which doesn't matter as these two don't last very long. So many favourite bits: the lesson in the draughty classroom on What Goes Up Must Come Down – with a disinterested Gerald Campion (the future TV Billy Bunter) sat behind Hawtrey – where Hay is taught a lesson; the dormitory feast where Hay gets tight on some jolly good lemonade to the delight of the boys; displaying his deep knowledge of gases to the boys in the science lesson; the denouement which could so easily have ended flat; but especially the delicious inquest in the barn, of which you must already know I'm going to say all I can say is Fiddlesticks!

In the decades before it got out onto DVD it was my most borrowed or copied tape by friends, which is why it's surprising to me that there have been so few commenters here so far. It's always been one of my favourites, a totally un-nasty un-cynical non-violent harmless old fashioned piece of fluff and a, no, the classic of its kind.