Where There's a Will (1936)
Directed by William Beaudine

Film Review

British comedy giant Will Hay delivers another enjoyable round of rib-tickling mayhem in this whimsical take on the American caper movie.  It may not be Hay's best film (the relentlessly funny Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937) probably deserves that epithet) but Where There's a Will is entertaining enough, best remembered for the sequence in which the seemingly inoffensive Hay manages to turn a teetotaller butler into a dipsomaniac, by the ruse of easing his toothache.

As was his custom, Hay does absolutely nothing to endear himself to his audience. One minute he is browbeating his long-suffering comrade-in-arms (i.e. stooge) Graham Moffatt, the next he is cheating his poor landlady. His is a likeably unlikeable persona that we just can't help falling in love with - an out-and-out anarchist cunningly disguised as a respectable authority figure. The film was directed by William Beaudine, an incredibly prolific American director who helmed several Will Hay comedies, including Boys Will Be Boys (1935) and Windbag the Sailor (1936). Whilst the formulaic plot may creak like a dilapidated old house, Hay's unique brand of comedy never flags for a moment and the laughs keep coming, thicker and faster as the piece erupts into another chaotic imbroglio of Will Hay-flavoured madness.

Film Synopsis

Benjamin Stubbins is a solicitor who has fallen on hard times.  Unable to attract clients, he is poorer than the proverbial Church mouse and faces being turned out of both his office and his lodgings.  His well-to-do relatives treat him as a pariah, probably because every time he visits them he gets himself and their butler blind drunk.  Stubbins's optimism that something will turn up is rewarded when, one day, a party of Americans show up at his office, asking him to trace the ancestry of one of them.  Seeing an opportunity to make easy money, Stubbins readily accepts the assignment, not realising that the Americans' real motive is to use his office so that they can break into the bank beneath...