'Windbag the Sailor' (1936) - The enduring comic genius of Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat.

If you'll forgive the pun, comedy is a funny thing.   It can be very personal, as much as matters of taste - what one person finds amusing, another may not.   It can work along cultural or national lines  - how often does the awkward phrase 'British sense of humour' rear its head as an explanation of Anglo-American misunderstanding? 

Screen comedians are no different.  I've written elsewhere about my love of Will Hay and I'm not ashamed to say that I count his films as among the funniest I've ever seen.  This is entirely subjective, of course, and I can't separate my appreciation of these films from my childhood memories of rainy school holidays and occasional sick days when BBC2's daytime schedule was full of Will Hay, James Robertson Justice, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges and Buster Crabbe serials.  

Will Hay

For these reasons I will concede that Hay's films are something of an acquired taste and might appear a little dated to the modern viewer but his influence on British comedy is undeniable I think.

  

After honing his act during a lengthy career in musical hall, Will Hay appeared in eighteen feature films between 1934 and 1943 for Gainsborough and Ealing studios, where he was mostly directed by Marcel Varnel. This extraordinary output saw him rival the biggest British cinema's biggest stars at that time, George Formby and Gracie Fields. Although they varied somewhat most of Hay's roles can be seen as variations on what the film critic Leslie Halliwell called 'the seedy incompetent' - a pompous fool who bluffs his way into a position of authority and is forced to live on his wits, or lack of... Alan Simpson, half of the Galton and Simpson partnership that wrote for Tony Hancock, describes him as "a con man on the verge of being found out, a ducker, a diver - always dodgy, always shifty'"and sees a direct influence on Arthur Lowe, Frankie Howerd and Hancock himself. You could add Basil Fawlty to that list too.

Hay's musical hall act revolved around a seedy schoolmaster and it was this persona he brought to the big screen in his first films, either at St Michael's or Narkover boarding school  - as in 'Boys Will Be Boys' (1935) and 'Good Morning Boys' (1937).

But Hay's best films were undoubtedly with Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat and together they formed one of British comedy's greatest screen teams. In their anarchic humour and brilliant interplay they were an English Marx brothers. 

1936's 'Windbag the Sailor' was their first film together and it set the tone for what was to come. Hay plays Benjamin Cutlet, a braggart who is paying for his drinks at a dockside inn by spinning yarns of his fictitious sea adventures.  Marriott (Harbottle) and Moffat (Albert) play employees at the inn and his unwitting accomplices as his bluff is called and he's forced to captain an unseaworthy ship and a mutinous crew who soon become wise to Hay's incompetence.

First Mate: Eight bells have gone sir.

Hay (shocked): Well, if it goes on like this we shan't have any left! 

The trio are shipwrecked with only a bakelite radio on an island populated by cannibals. The radio, or 'voice in box', proves awe-inspiring to the cannibals and saves the day as Hay assumes the role of Big Chief Radio Luxembourg and Marriott Big Chief Weather Forecast. You get the general idea, I'm sure. 

Hay was a gifted physical comedian with a huge range of facial expressions and an absolute master of the double-take (Graham Rinaldi claims there are over 200 in his films - crying out for a Youtube compilation video, I'd say). Yet it is the interplay between the three actors that raises their films to the sublime.  Marriot was a remarkable actor in his own right, earning himself the accolade 'British Cinema's master of disguise'. He specialised in appearing as characters much older than his actual age, mischievously winning Southend On Sea's oldest inhabitant competition in 1931, at the ripe old age of 46. 

Moore Marriott in 'Windbag the Sailor' 

Moffat tended to play the smart-alec, wise  to and often critical of Hay's schemes. It probably helped the on-screen dynamic that Hay and Moffatt apparently weren't the best of friends off screen.

Graham Moffatt

So, a comic trio comprising of a boastful shyster, a cynical, smart-alec youngster and a silly old duffer. Sound familiar?

Whether John Sullivan deliberately paid homage to Hay's team is not clear but the influence is there for all to see. I don't pretend that these comic archetypes originated with Hay; the 'old fool' character can be seen as far back as Homer's 'Iliad' and the character Nestor who serves no other purpose in the Trojan war than to offer advice and reminiscences to the younger Greek leaders, usually of the 'in my day...' variety.

While 'Windbag..' was the first time this trio appeared together it wasn't their most celebrated movie - that accolade would probably be granted to 'Oh Mr Porter!' (1937)  or arguably 'Ask A Policeman' (1939). The former was listed by film critics Barry Norman and Derek Malcolm in the top 100 films of the twentieth century. I tend to think of these movies as a pair as they are very similar.  In both our trio are in positions of pointless authority - railway porters at a station that has no passing trains in the former, policemen in a town without crime in the latter. 

In both, their easy life is complicated by seemingly supernatural agencies - a ghost train in the former, a 'eadless 'orseman in the latter. It won't be too much of a spoiler to say that both films have a Scooby Doo-like resolution.

If pushed I would probably pick 'Ask A Policeman' as my favourite, if only for the brilliant scene where Marriott simultaneously plays Harbottle and Harbottle's father (with an even longer beard and an even more high-pitched voice very reminiscent of Terry Jones' character in 'Life of Brian' ).

The team made three more films together, 'Old Bones of the River' (1938), 'Convict 99' (1939) and 'Where's That Fire' (1940). Hay continued to make films after the dissolution of the partnership, with Claude Hulbert and a young Charles Hawtrey as his new stooges but it is the seedy schoolmaster and, in particular, the films with Marriot and Moffat retain a special place in my memory and the annals of British comedy.  

Will Hay died on April 18th 1949, aged 60 - perhaps fittingly, the retirement age of a schoolmaster.

References/further reading - Graham Rinaldi's comprehensive biography 'Will Hay', Tomahawk Press, 2009.