Film Review
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 great 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. Watch closely and you may catch
a fleeting glimpse of Clive Dunn in his first screen role,
more than thirty years before he found immorality as Lance Corporal
Jones in the BBC television series
Dad's Army.
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.