Where There’s a Will – 1936 | 81 mins | Comedy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Will Hay plays Benjamin Stubbins, an impoverished solicitor and black sheep of the family whose daughter is being raised by his snobbish country-seat relations. There is a lot of potential in this character, and the opening scenes are promising. Stubbins is seen in his office giving instructions to his indolent comic-reading office boy (Graham Moffatt) on how to impress his non-existent clients. Later he visits his brother-in-law’s stately home and, in the film’s most amusing sequence, gets the teetotal butler drunk by recommending alcohol for his toothache and challenging him to a tipsy game of billiards.

But that’s almost the end of the fun. For Stubbins becomes a pawn in a drearily hackneyed plot in which some American gangsters use his office to get at a bank safe in the basement below, putting him off the scent by giving him a spurious job tracing genealogies. He finally outwits the gang, which turns its attentions to his brother-in-law’s home, by playing Santa Claus at a Christmas Eve party and exposing them as bogus guests. There is one witty conceit in this finale in which a group of carolling policemen sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ outside the house, unaware that all the guests are being stripped of their valuables within. But this felicitous moment comes much too late to salvage the film.