Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937) - film review

Having failed in virtually every other job, railway employee William Porter finally feels he has found his metier as a wheel-tapper, but his sister decides that this is too lowly a position for him.  She tells her husband, who just happens to be the man who runs the railways, that unless he finds William a more respectable job, she will invite him to live in their house.  Mr Porter’s sudden promotion takes him to Northern Ireland, where he will be the stationmaster at a remote country station in the backwater town of Buggleskelly.  To Mr Porter’s dismay, the station is in a derelict state, trains hardly ever stop there, and the locals are so afraid of a ghost that is reputed to haunt the area that they never venture outdoors after dark.  As if all this was not enough, his deputy and porter survive by stealing goods from passing trains and swapping tickets for food.  Mr Porter is the latest in a long line of station masters who either went to an early grave or bought a one-way ticket to the funny farm within a few weeks of starting work at the station.  Determined to make a change for the better, Mr Porter has the station redecorated and sets about arranging excursions to nearby towns.  Just how long will it be before the curse of Buggleskelly claims its next victim...?

The greatest and funniest of all Will Hay’s comedies, Oh, Mr. Porter! still stands as one of the all-time classics of British cinema, a joyous anarchic romp that can never fail to send an audience into hysterics of unbridled laughter.  Once again, Hay is cast as the pompous authority figure whose Grade A ineptitude proves to be the catalyst for a series of comic disasters of escalating hilarity.   Although he has the demeanour of a surly schoolmaster and the aptitude of a man who can’t toast a slice of bread without incinerating his entire neighbourhood, Will Hay’s comedy persona is every bit as engaging as that of the other comedy giants of his era.

Oh, Mr. Porter! offers a compendium of some of the funniest jokes you will find in any British film – quick-fire dialogue (which moves at the pace of a TGV) and inventive visual gags that rival anything that Keaton and Chaplin came up with.  The wagons which accidentally get shunted over the side of a precipice...  The three protagonists spinning helplessly around on the sails of a windmill...  And throughout all this mayhem, Will Hay’s character is unflummoxed and unflustered, totally unaware that he is the instigator of the chaos that surrounds him.  (Admit it, we’ve all worked for people like that at some time.)  There can be no better introduction to the work of this now sadly neglected comic genius than this inspired and irresistibly funny comedy masterpiece.

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