Oh, Mr Porter!

This article is about the film. For music hall song, see Oh! Mr Porter.

Oh, Mr Porter!
(left to right) Graham Moffatt as Albert, Moore Marriott as Harbottle, and Will Hay as William Porter
Directed by	Marcel Varnel
Produced by	Edward Black
Written by	J.O.C.Orton Marriott Edgar Val Guest
Starring	Will Hay Graham Moffatt Moore Marriott
Music by	Louis Levy
Cinematography	Arthur Crabtree
Editing by	R.E. Dearing Alfred Roome
Distributed by	Gainsborough Pictures
Release date(s)	1937
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Oh, Mr Porter! (1937) is a British comedy film starring Will Hay with Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt and directed by Marcel Varnel. While not his most commercially successful, it is probably his best-known film to modern audiences. It is widely acclaimed as the best of Hay's work, and a classic of its time and genre.

The plot of Oh, Mr Porter was loosely based on the Arnold Ridley play The Ghost Train and was later remade (with a naval setting) as Up the Creek (1958) with David Tomlinson and Peter Sellers. The title was taken from Oh! Mr Porter, a music hall song.

Jimmy Perry said that the triumvirate of Captain Mainwaring, Corporal Jones and Private Pike in Dad's Army was inspired by watching Oh, Mr Porter.^[1]

Plot

William Porter (Will Hay) is an inept railway worker who - due to family connections - is given the job of stationmaster at a remote and ramshackle rural Northern Irish railway station in the (fictitious) town of Buggleskelly, situated on the border with the then Irish Free State.

After taking the ferry from England to Northern Ireland, Porter is aghast when he discovers how isolated the station is. It is situated out in the countryside, two miles cross-country from the nearest bus stop. To make matters worse, local legend has it that the ghost of One-Eyed Joe the Miller haunts the line and, as a result, no-one will go near the station after dark.

Porter's co-workers at the station are the elderly deputy stationmaster, Harbottle (Moore Marriott), and an overweight, insolent young porter, Albert (Graham Moffatt), who make a living by stealing goods in transit and swapping railway tickets for food. They welcome Porter to his new job by regaling him with tales of the deaths and disappearances of previous stationmasters - each apparently the victim of the curse of One-Eyed Joe.

From the beginning it is obvious that the station is run very unprofessionally. Porter is woken up by a cow sticking its head through the room he is sleeping in, for instance (the cow has been lost in transit and is being milked by Harbottle), and the team's breakfast consists of bacon made from a litter of piglets which the railway are supposed to be looking after for a local farmer.

Determined to shake things up (particularly after he is forced to deal with the irate farmer when he comes to collect his pigs), Stationmaster Porter tries to renovate the station in several ways, most sensibly by painting the entire station, but also by less conventional means - including stopping the passing express and organising an excursion to Connemara.

Porter attempts to drum up business amongst the local people in the pub by offering tickets to this excursion, but due to arguments about where the excursion should go a fight breaks out. Porter crawls to safety in the landlord's rooms next door, where he meets a one-eyed man who introduces himself as Joe and offers to buy all of the tickets for an away game that the village football team, the Buggleskelly Wednesday, are playing the following day.

Unbeknown to Porter, however, he has really agreed to transport a group of criminals who are involved in running guns to the Irish Free State. The 'football' train leaves at six a.m. the following morning, rather than the scheduled ten a.m., at the insistence of Joe and although Porter questions some of the odd packages being loaded onto the train, he accepts Joe's claim that these are in fact goalposts for the game.

The train disappears as the smugglers divert it down a disused branch line near the border, and with everybody claiming that Porter has lost his mind (there is no such team as Buggleskelly Wednesday, and Harbottle points out that the local team wouldn't leave without him as he is their centre forward). Apparently this misunderstanding causes Porter to lose his job, as no one has seen the train. Then after his co-workers talk about a tunnel on a nearby disused branch line, Porter decides to head off to track down the errant engine (in hopes of getting his job back).

The trio find the missing train inside a derelict railway tunnel, underneath a supposedly haunted windmill. They investigate and are briefly captured by the gun runners, but escape and climb progressively higher up the windmill until eventually they are trapped at the top.

Using the windmill sails, they contrive to get down where they hatch a plan to capture the gun runners. Coupling the carriages containing the criminals and their guns to their own engine, Gladstone, they carry them away from the border at full speed, burning everything from Harbottle's underwear to the remnants of a fence they smash through in order to keep up steam. To keep the criminals quiet, Albert climbs on top of the carriage and hits anyone who sticks their head out with a large shovel.

Porter writes a note explaining the situation and places it in Harbottle's empty 'medicine' bottle. When they pass a large station, he throws the bottle through the window of the stationmaster's office, alerting the authorities to their plight. The entire railway goes into action, with lines being closed and other trains re-routed so that Gladstone can finally crash into a siding where the waiting police force arrest the gun runners.

After a short-lived celebration, in which Harbottle points out that Gladstone is ninety years old and Porter claims it is good for another ninety, the engine explodes after its hectic journey, and Porter, Harbottle and Albert lower their hats in respect.

Cast

• Will Hay as William Porter
• Moore Marriott as Jeremiah Harbottle
• Graham Moffatt as Albert Brown
• Percy Walsh as Superintendent
• Dave O'Toole as Postman
• Sebastian Smith as Mr Trimbletow
• Agnes Laughlan as Mrs Trimbletow
• Dennis Wyndham as Grogan
• Frederick Piper as Ledbetter
• Frederick Lloyd as Minister

Terling Windmill where the windmill scene was filmed.

Production

Despite the majority of the film being set in Northern Ireland, none of the filming was done there—the railway station at Buggleskelly was the disused Cliddesden railway station on the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway, which had closed to goods in 1936.^[2] Filming took place from mid-June 1937 and lasted approximately two months.^[3] The windmill in which Porter and his colleagues are trapped is located at Terling, Essex,^[4] and "Gladstone", the ancient steam train, was portrayed by No.2 Northiam 2-4-0T built by Hawthorn Leslie in 1899 and loaned by the Kent and East Sussex Railway to the film. The engine was returned to the company after completion of the film and remained in service until 1941, when it was scrapped.^[5][6]

The title sequence uses scenes shot at a variety of locations on the Waterloo to Southampton railway line, and according to John Huntley in his book Railways on Screen, "[t]he editor reversed his negative at one stage in preparing the title backgrounds, causing them to come out reversed on the final print".^[7] The scene in which Porter travels to Buggleskelly by bus, whilst being warned of a terrible danger by locals, parodies that of the Tod Browning film, Dracula (1931).^[8]

The Southern Railway of Northern Ireland that Porter works for is fictitious, in reality from the route chosen on the map the line would have belonged to the Great Northern Railway (Ireland), with Buggleskelly being close to the real town of Lisnaskea. In addition, the Irish border on the map portrayed in the film is inaccurate, placing the border too far east, and roughly along the eastern coast of Lough Erne rather than the border of County Fermanagh.

Reception

The film has been very well received over time:

The British Film Institute included the film in its 360 Classic Feature Films list;^[9] Variety magazine described the movie as "amusing, if over-long", noting that there was "[n]o love interest to mar the comedy";^[10] and the cult website TV Cream listed it at number 41 in its list of cinema's Top 100 Films.^[11]

The film critic Barry Norman included it among his 100 best films of all time, and fellow critic Derek Malcolm also included the film in his Century of Films, describing it as "perfectly representing a certain type of bumbling British humour",^[12] despite being directed by a Parisian director.

The director Marcel Varnel considered the film as amongst his best work,^[13] and it was described in 2006 as "a comic masterpiece of the British cinema" by The Times in its obituary for writer, Val Guest.^[14]

Reviews

Modern reviews

• C4 Review
• Spinning Image Review
• Bootleg Files Review
• Screenonline Review

Contemporary reviews

• Variety Magazine Review, 1937
• BFI Monthly Film Bulletin Review, October 1937

Parody

The film was parodied in the Harry Enfield spoof documentary Norbert Smith - a Life, as Oh, Mr Bank Robber! starring "Will Silly".^[15]

References

1. ^ James Perry, A Stupid Boy (2002), p.100
2. ^ Ray Seaton and Roy Martin, Good Morning, Boys: Will Hay Master of Comedy (1978)
3. ^ Dean, Martin; Kevin Robertson, Roger Simmonds (1998). The Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway. Crusader Press. pp. 76–81. 
4. ^ NTG Oh Mr Porter Trivia
5. ^ "Colonel Stephens' New Locomotives". The Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. http://www.hfstephens-museum.org.uk/locomotives/new-locomotives.html. Retrieved 2011-05-13. 
6. ^ Gregory, Paul. "Northiam". Weston Clevedon and Portishead Railway. http://www.portisheadweb.org.uk/wcpr/Northiam.html. Retrieved 2011-05-13. 
7. ^ John Huntley, Railways on Screen (1993)
8. ^ screenonline: Oh, Mr Porter! (1937)
9. ^ Top 100 Movie Lists - BFI's 360 Classic Feature Films
10. ^ "Oh, Mr. Porter! Movie Review". Variety. 1 January 1937. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117793667.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0. 
11. ^ TV Cream's Top 100 Films
12. ^ Marcel Varnel: Oh, Mr Porter! | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film
13. ^ So You Want To Be In Pictures: The Autobiography of Val Guest
14. ^ The Times, 16 May 2006
15. ^ BBC - Comedy - Shows A-Z Index

External links

• Oh, Mr Porter! at the Internet Movie Database
• Oh, Mr Porter! is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Article on the song, with a sound file of the tune
• Guardian article on the film
• "Full Steam Ahead"
• Link to video clip of Oh, Mr Porter
• "First Stop Buggleskelly" - the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway