The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942)

The Black Sheep of Whitehall is a British comedy thriller film first released in 1942, directed by Basil Dearden and Will Hay.  The film stars Will Hay, John Mills, Basil Sydney, Henry Hewitt and Felix Aylmer.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Will Davis is the proprietor of a correspondence college that prides itself on its academic excellence, even if it has difficulty competing with the better known academic institutions.  The college’s only pupil is Bobby Jessop, a junior employee at the Ministry of International Commerce in London.  When Jessop abandons his mathematic course and refuses to settle his fees, Davis storms into his office and threatens to ruin his career unless he pays up.  Jessop manages to placate Davis by offering to find him a job at the Ministry.  As he waits for Jessop to return, Davis is mistaken for a distinguished economics professor, Davys, who is to play a crucial part in agreeing a pact between Great Britain and the countries of South America.  The real Davys has in fact just been abducted by Nazi agents who are determined to wreck the pact, thereby depriving Britain of a valuable wartime ally.   Realising the truth of this, Jessop and Davis join forces and set about trying to find the missing professor...

It is a little known fact that Basil Dearden, one of Britain’s finest  directors, began his filmmaking career at Ealing Studios under the tutelage of Will Hay, at the time Britain’s leading comic performer.  The Black Sheep of Whitehall was the first of three films that Hay and Dearden made together, a madcap wartime piece which sees the highly improbable pairing of Hay with John Mills, who had just been invalided out of Royal Engineers after been diagnosed with a stomach ulcer.  Once again, Hay is the loveably inept purveyor of education, this time assisted by Thora Hird in his attempts to wring humour from high school mathematics.  Nice work if you can get it.

Whilst certainly not the best of Will Hay’s comedies, the film manages to be an fast-moving and enjoyable romp, best remembered for Hay’s frequent changes of identity – one minute he’s a bumbling old ticket collector, the next he’s a rather fetching nursing sister.  Although Mills’s acting talents are completely wasted here, his pairing with Hay is an inspiration and they form a surprisingly good double act.  The car chase sequence, in which this enterprising duo are pursued across country by ruthless Nazi agents, is one of the most memorable of Hay’s entire film career.  This volley of anarchic fun makes a stark contrast with Ealing’s subsequent comedies, which would be far more sophisticated and much less reliant on vaudevillian slapstick for laughs.

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