Windbag the Sailor

A big fan of Will Hay .... this is typical of his humour with his 2 compatriots. Standard fayre but perfect timing makes it good even 80 years on.

A retired barge captain entertains customers in a pub with tall tales of days at sea. He gets caught out when he is tricked into captaining an unseaworthy ship which is to be scuttled for insurance money.

Mildly amusing film with Will Hay as the ship captain aided by Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat as stowaways. These three would go on to to make other, better, films together. Some racial stereotypes and language are now outdated.

I've always enjoyed British humor and comedy; and I think the British movies and TV sitcoms of the late 20th century are generally far superior to those on this side of the pond. But, until recently I hadn't seen many early English films. So, I was surprised and pleased to find that our English cousins also had some early doses of slapstick and buffoonery on film. .

"Windbag the Sailor" is such a film. Its cast has some stars of British cinema from the silent days to the early years of sound pictures. Will Hay didn't start in pictures until sound, but he was a talented actor, writer and director. He plays Captain Ben Cutlet, who has many a yarn about his seagoing days to spin at the local pub. One can guess what the plot might be from that. Other actors add to the goofy plot that is punctuated with some hilarious scenes.

I don't know if the United Kingdom had anything like vaudeville. It surely had performance halls for such entertainment. A number of early American stage entertainers took their vaudeville acts to Europe in the early 20th century. If the Brits didn't have a phase of vaudeville, the country was quick to develop its own film industry. Movie houses opened as quickly as in the Americas. Comedies, dramas, mysteries and adventure films soon became common fare for the Brits. "Windbag the Sailor" is an early example of British buffoonery on film that most movie buffs should enjoy.

Will Hay appears, not as a schoolmaster this time, but as an incompetent sea captain. However his character is, as usual, one of seedy incompetence, with few redeeming features,for whom one nevertheless roots, with touches of W.C. Fields (not that I am accusing Hay of plagiarism.) The plot, however, has touches of Buster Keaton's "The Navigator." Marriot and Moffat, in their first film with Hay, provide excellent comic support. By no means Hay's best film but well worth watching.

This first entry in the six movies made by the English comic trio of Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt. The film manages to entertain and delight from start to finish. Will Hay once again finds himself in an impossible situation: the captain of a British merchant marine vessel heading towards Norway. Marriot and Moffatt are landlubbers who are stowaways on the ship. Of course there is a mutiny and the three become castaways on a South Pacific Island. This movie contains some funny Buster Keaton moments on board of the ship. The funniest scene has Hay, Marriott and Moffatt trying to coordinate the latitude and longitude of the ship.