Boys Will Be Boys

Will Hay - Dr. Alec Smart
Gordon Harker - Father Brown
Jimmy Hanley - Cyril Brown
Davy Burnaby - Colonel Crableigh
Norma Varden - Lady Dorking
Claude Dampier - Theo P. Finch
Charles Farrell - Louis Brown
Percy Walsh - Prison Governor
Peter Gawthorne - School governor

This was the first film to give full rein to Will Hay's schoolmaster persona and establish the character he was to bring to perfection in later movies. Although the latter part of the picture (involving a stolen necklace which is first planted on Hay and which he later has to try to recover) is rather mechanical, the first half is lively. Even before he gets to Narkover (which he naturally does by a forged letter of recommendation), we see him in two 'classroom situations': giving boys an anatomy lesson and instructing inmates at the local jail in lepidoptery ('Iepi for butter and doptery for fly', he explains nonchalantly to one prisoner who crosses swords with him over Greek and Latin philology). As Alexander Smart (soon shortened to 'Smart Alec'), Hay gravitates quite effortlessly to a school which supplies the prison with 80 per cent of its population, where felony and anarchy are the order of the day, and where memorial plaques extol the virtues of old boys who have really distinguished themselves in the annals of crime.

Arriving at the school, he is greeted in time-honoured Narkover fashion with a bomb under his car, a welcome-carpet yanked from beneath his feet, a blanket-tossing and a pocket-picking. His rival for the headship (Claude Dampier) tells him, 'We'll put you on the roll of honour now because you might not be here for very long.' He infuriates the crusty vice-chairman of the governors (Peter Gawthorne) by smashing his watch performing a trick with it, but manages to ingratiate himself with chairwoman, Lady Dorking (Norma Varden). We got a glimpse of the meanness which lurks under Hay's servile bonhomie to his superiors; catching a classroom culprit who is a good deal taller than himself, he punishes instead a completely innocent but much smaller boy.

Boys Will Be Boys includes a reprise in full of Hay's celebrated 'How high is a Chinaman?' routine, but the film's set-piece is a founders-day ceremony in which he executes a beautifully timed repeated gag of smashing a plate while wielding a toastmaster's hammer. He then becomes the hero of the annual rugby match between the school and the prison, lobbing the hall which contains the stolen necklace into the arms of the local constabulary before being buried under both teams, and he is chaired off the field in triumph.

Boys Will Be Boys may not be an unmixed pleasure for 'Beachcomber' fans, but it is hard to see how his distinctive sketch writing could have found a satisfactory screen equivalent. More importantly, the film gave Hay the springboard he needed to reshape his stage schoolmasterisms for the camera - and it is a good augury of the films to come.