Though he gets solo above-the-title billing, Will Hay was no more a solo comedian than Groucho Marx--and Oh, Mr Porter!, one of his finest vehicles, finds him congenially teamed with sidekicks Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt in one of the British cinema's greatest comedy gangs. Hay's William Porter, an inept railway worker, is shunted off to the dead-end job of stationmaster in Buggleskelly, Northern Ireland, arriving as the latest in a long line of doomed souls who have left their presentation clocks on the mantelpiece of the dilapidated office. The delight of the... film is in the interplay between Hay and Marriott, the single-toothed dotty old-timer, and Moffatt, the chubby smart kid, as they fail the most basic requirements of their jobs but come up trumps when investigating the ghost of One-Eyed Joe and his haunted mill, discovering a branch line being used by cross-border gun-smugglers who are defeated in a spirited final chase. There's some slapstick with an escape from the mill in a high wind and the last ride of the venerable locomotive Gladstone, but Hay works best with character comedy, pompously reprimanding his subordinates for dodges he proceeds to pull himself, reacting to every ominous line with a perfect double-take and blithely surviving the chaos his character causes wherever he goes. --Kim Newman [show more]
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