Oh, Mr. Porter!

This has to be the all time best British comedy film, filmed quickly and cheaply as usual. Since I was a kid in the early '70's I've seen it more times than any other film except the Wizard of Oz and maybe the Big Sleep - see it once a year and it still seems amazingly fresh and funny. It's always been one of my daughters' favourite films, so I know it's not just me and similar oldies. And yet it doesn't appear in any of the American film books I've read, I can only surmise they don't show it in the US. It's their terrible loss, and I would urge all fun loving Americans to hunt down and view a copy!

Rundown railway station gets rundown railway station master and staff, up against gun smugglers and the ghost of One Eyed Joe. British humour maybe, but completely clean and non offensive if paradoxically also a little non PC - not like today! Fast and frantic, there's more gags a minute than most (if not all) other film comedies from any country or era. What a Golden Age it would have been if all pre-War British films could have been like this, instead of the quota quickies they churned out.

Will Hay/Moore Marriott/Graham Moffatt/Marcel Varnel/Gainsborough's masterpiece for succeeding discerning generations to discover and cherish.

If anyone out there still "does the ironing", this is a perfect movie to watch while doing so. Time flies and so does the ironing! This and Arthur Askey's Ghost Train. Great and innocent FUN! Even if slightly dimwitted!I wish they still made comedies like this today.

I saw this film in 1937 when I was 10. I am now 76 and can remember almost the entire plot. I would list this amongst my top 10 films together with The Quiet Man, Dr. Strangelove, Random Harvest and a few others including The Grapes of Wrath.

It's very difficult to describe the comedy of Will Hay . He was very popular in Britain in the thirties, on radio, the music hall and in film. He looked shabby, seedy and shifty and usually played not very pleasant characters who can only be described as failed con artists, but funny he was. This is probably his best movie and it holds up very well. The plot owns something to that British classic of the theater THE GHOST TRAIN.

Interesting trivia point. This and many of these very British comedies, including some of the George Formbies were directed by a Frenchman Marcel Varnel.

This is a bit of trivia for the benefit of all train spotters out there. Presumably as a result of the film being made on Southern Railway, several miles to the north of Southampton, the credits incorporate a few unacknowledged shots of Southampton. Most obviously, the station that's shown on emerging from a tunnel is the old Southampton West station, now Southampton Central, in the form it took before Hermann Goering radically reshaped it. Perhaps the shots were intended as part of the final reel. If so, they count as outtakes, recycled in the credits.

Say something about the film, must I? Well, of course, it's sheer genius. Surely that doesn't need saying. I can't wait for the day that Quentin Tarantino discovers it.