Boys Will Be Boys (1935) - film review

Dr Alexander Smart is hopeful that a letter of recommendation from his present employer, the Governor of Blackstone Prison, will secure him the post of headmaster at Narkover School.  The Governor, however, has other ideas and writes him a far from flattering testimonial.  Ex-convict Faker Brown persuades Smart to swap this letter for one which he had earlier dictated, and, by this minor subterfuge, Smart does indeed get the job.   The usual schoolboy pranks are doled out to Smart by the bucket-load when he arrives at the school, but his real enemy is the school’s vice-chairman, Colonel Crableigh, who had intended that his nephew would get the job of headmaster.   When Faker Brown turns up and threatens to expose him for sending in a fraudulent reference, Smart has no choice but to find him a job as a school porter.  When Brown meets Lady Dorking, the school’s chairman, he cannot help noticing her diamond necklace...

Boys Will Be Boys is the film that made Will Hay a star of British cinema in the 1930s.  It was his first film for Gainsborough Pictures and in it he plays the character, the bumbling schoolmaster, that he had perfected in his music hall act during the 1920s.  (Originally, he played the part in drag, as a prim schoolmistress).  Hay would reprise the role very successfully in two subsequent films, Good Morning Boys (1937), and The Ghost of St Michael’s (1941).

Throughout the 1930s, Will Hay played odious authoritarian figures in a number of films, characters who were generally conniving and duplicitous.  Yet whilst he portrayed these unsavoury characters convincingly, Hay would always steal the audience’s sympathy, showing that you don’t have to play a likeable character to be popular.  His schoolmaster creation is a case in point.  He is both villain and victim; he behaves atrociously towards others but he always gets his comeuppance, and you just can’t help liking him. 

There are two main reasons why Will Hay’s comedy was so popular.  First, Hay was a terrific performer, a perfectionist who delivered the laughs as effectively and as effortlessly as the other great comedy giants of his era: Chaplin, Keaton, etc.  Second, Hay’s comedy invariably pokes fun at those self-important establishment figures who were so reviled by most ordinary people at the time (and still are).

Boys Will Be Boys is a wonderfully anarchic comedy that mercilessly lampoons one of England’s greatest institutions, the public school.  It was inspired by the Dr Smart-Allick stories, which appeared in J.B. Morton’s Beachcomber column in the Daily Express.  The jokes aren’t particularly sophisticated, and a few (such as the How High is a Chinaman gag) are laboured almost to the point of torture, yet the sheer abundance of gags, visual and scripted, ensures the audience is constantly amused, making this one of Will Hay’s great comedy triumphs.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?