It has been rightly said that Will Hay and his two sidekicks, the geriatric and the juvenile, never went on to do anything better than this. But it does not mean that the film has weathered well since.
The comic trio are acting as the local police force in a village that has been crime-free for ten years, supposedly thanks to their efforts, but also putting them at risk of redundancy. So they have to fabricate some crime in order to save their jobs. This leads to a traditional smuggler's cove adventure, where the location of the booty is hidden in the last line of an old verse that only the geriatric's super-geriatric father can just remember, after a lot of prodding. Predictably they run into the middle of a real crime in progress, and are temporarily overpowered and locked up in their own cell. How they escape from the cell is hilarious, though we can't reveal it here.
Otherwise the gags are rather limp, and the action quite confusing. How they end up on the racetrack at Brooklands is pretty contrived, though it makes fun watching. And even audiences of the time had probably learned to mistrust the smoothie-gent with the neat moustache, so you won't be surprised that not all is what it seems in the social hierarchy of the village.
Hay was the third most popular comedian in England when this film came out, but Hitler invaded Poland the same week, and everything - including humour - would change irrevocably. At times, he seems to think he's still doing his schoolmaster music-hall sketch that had taken him around the world for so long. (Police do not usually stand by the roadside discussing mental arithmetic.) Also his fake bald patch is so obvious, we can't think why he wanted it in the first place. But he was an odd fish anyway, whose unfinished memoirs were called 'I Enjoyed Every Minute'. That is not how the rest of the cast remembered him at all.
The comic trio are acting as the local police force in a village that has been crime-free for ten years, supposedly thanks to their efforts, but also putting them at risk of redundancy. So they have to fabricate some crime in order to save their jobs. This leads to a traditional smuggler's cove adventure, where the location of the booty is hidden in the last line of an old verse that only the geriatric's super-geriatric father can just remember, after a lot of prodding. Predictably they run into the middle of a real crime in progress, and are temporarily overpowered and locked up in their own cell. How they escape from the cell is hilarious, though we can't reveal it here.
Otherwise the gags are rather limp, and the action quite confusing. How they end up on the racetrack at Brooklands is pretty contrived, though it makes fun watching. And even audiences of the time had probably learned to mistrust the smoothie-gent with the neat moustache, so you won't be surprised that not all is what it seems in the social hierarchy of the village.
Hay was the third most popular comedian in England when this film came out, but Hitler invaded Poland the same week, and everything - including humour - would change irrevocably. At times, he seems to think he's still doing his schoolmaster music-hall sketch that had taken him around the world for so long. (Police do not usually stand by the roadside discussing mental arithmetic.) Also his fake bald patch is so obvious, we can't think why he wanted it in the first place. But he was an odd fish anyway, whose unfinished memoirs were called 'I Enjoyed Every Minute'. That is not how the rest of the cast remembered him at all.