Boys Will Be Boys

It was in this film that Will Hay brought to the screen the sketch that he had been touring the halls for years,the seedy master.He effectively played this in all of his subsequent films,with variations.He thus became a film star in the U.K..I am especially fond of this film as I first saw it at a film society at school 55 years ago.Not many of my classmates thought it funny but I did and still do. With regard to the rhyming slang you should bear in mind that one of the censors for the BBFC was a retired Colonel,and another a spinster,as they used to call elderly unmarried women,so I don't think that they would have had any idea of the real meaning of the words

Will Hay is Alexander Smart, who whilst teaching in prison, asks the Governor to write him a recommendation to aid his application for the position of Headmaster at Narkover School. Thinking the Governor has done him a favour, Smart is most perturbed to find that the Governor has written a less than flattering reference. Hope comes in illegal form when prisoner Faker Brown sends off a forged signature glowing reference, one that gets Smart the position. However, Smart's problems are just about to begin because Narkover is a hotbed of crime, and that's just the pupils!

Based on J.B. Morton's {AKA Beachcomber} humorous Dr Alec Smart character than ran in column form in Britain's Daily Express Newspaper from the mid 1920s, this was to be Will Hay's first film for Gainsborough Pictures. It was also to be his big break in cinema. Hay had made his name in British music hall productions in the 1920s, where as a bumbling buffoon schoolmaster, he served notice of a character that would make up a number of his big screen persona's. Boys Will Be Boys, directed by William Beaudine and co-written by Hay and Robert Edmunds, finds Hay honing the inept teacher role for better and far funnier productions that were still to come. But that in no way means this film isn't funny, because it certainly is.

A number of well executed comedy sequences light up the already jolly script. See an interesting line in carpet surfing, a how high is a Chinaman skit and a fabulous finale involving the school annual rugby match. Where missing diamonds and a whistle provide first class excuse for fun and frolics. There's also a fun thread involving Davy Burnaby's constantly exasperated Col. Crableigh, who had wanted his hapless nephew Theo P. Finch {Claude Dampier} in the headmasters position. If you can't find joy in a magic trick scene involving Crableigh's watch then there be no hope for you!. Filling out the cast is Norma Varden as Lady Dorking and Gordon Harker as the crooked Faker Brown who has come to the school to get rewarded for his forging favour to Alec. Oh and a whole ream of unruly pupils getting up to no end of mischief and crooked shenanigans.

Allegaza, Allegazi, Allegazam. 7/10

As the film clearly highlights, there is very little difference for a teacher if he is teaching in a prison or an all-boys school. Both venues require discipline and ingenuity, as well as a bit of patience. The movie is amusing despite some of the predictable pranks of the students. Add a star if you are a teacher.

Dr. Alexander Smart (Smart Alec to the boys) gets himself headmastership at a boys' school when he and another man forge a letter of recommendation from his previous boss (throwing out the original letter that says quite the opposite!) While there, he ends up tangled in an elaborate jewel robbery, and is caught between a rock and a hard place when the thief lets him know that he still has the original letter, which he will show to the heads if Alex should mess up their plans.

If you're not a fan of the great Mr Hay, have never seen one of his films but are wondering what all the fuss was about don't watch this one first. Eventually you love this but only after you've become a fan. To do that watch OH MR PORTER first, then you'll be desperate to voraciously devour this and the rest of them.

This film basically showcased the music hall act Will Hay had been touring with since the 1920s, his performance is therefore honed to perfection. To some extent this is like the pilot episode of what was to follow - it's nearly there but even so however many times you watch it, it never gets stale or fails to make you laugh. His character and his story is extraordinarily silly but by setting it within an insular and isolated environment, without contextual reference to the outside world, such silliness seems fine. English public school system in the 1930s was hardly the exam-focussed institutions of today. They had improved since the bad old days when they were there to make money and in theory develop boys' character rather than educate him with the philosophy exemplified by the famous quotation of Thucydides: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must but a lot of them were still atrocious places with completely unqualified teachers so Narkover School is probably a lot more representative of reality than you'd imagine. This is hardly a brutal and cutting satire of that system but nevertheless like Monty Python did years later (who'd also had first-hand experience of public schools) it laughs at the stupidity and incompetence of such institutions.

Will Hay was born for cinema. Although he had been a massive comedy star on the stage since starting off as 'the English W C Fields' in the 20s, because so much of his humour is derived from his facial expressions and his incoherent mumblings - things which couldn't be picked up on a stage fifty metres away, moving and talking pictures were the perfect medium for bringing his anarchic yet safe humour to the world. His first few films at BIP can be ignored but having moved studios to Gaumont-British, this was his first 'proper' picture. Some might say that all his subsequent ones at G-B were just remakes of this, indeed Will Hay himself thought that towards the end of his contract there but if it's such a good formula, why not repeat it! As time progressed his pictures got much better both funnier and better produced but this one, the original is the comedy equivalent to the source of the Amazon - perhaps not as wild and torrential as further downstream but pure and full of life.