The Goose Steps Out

Will Hay - William Potts/Herr Muller
Frank Pettingell - Professor Hoffman
Julian Mitchell - General von Glotz
Raymond Lovell - Schmidt
Charles Hawtrey - Max
Leslie Harcourt - Vagel
Peter Ustinov - Krauss

Will Hay's Ealing film, The Goose Steps Out, used a war theme broadly. Once again a plot device of mistaken identity is used, this time when an arrested German spy turns out to be Hay's doppelganger, with British intelligence taking advantage. Hay's biographers, Ray Seaton and Roy Martin, are dismissive of the film, which they feel is crude, jingoistic and laboured, best excused as Hay's contribution to the war effort. It is certainly true that the Germans are pathetic caricatures, humourless idiots lacking the intelligence even to guard their secret weapons properly, but for that matter the British, represented by Hay, are muddlers and amateurs, achieving their aims by accident.

The most remembered scene in the film has Hay in his familiar role of a teacher before his class, but he is in Nazi uniform, masquerading as a German masterspy and his pupils are young brownshirts, embryonic agents learning how to behave in England. His class, which includes Charles Hawtrey and Peter Ustinov, is taught that the correct form of respectable salutation is a V-sign with the knuckles facing outwards, and shortly they are all practising assiduously before the portrait of the Fuhrer. In the climate of 1942, when British morale was at its lowest, what may now seem jingoistic acted as an innocent safety valve, and the film was popularly received.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.