Pot Luck

The 'funniest team of comedians on any screen today' have aged less well than contemporaries like Claude Hulbert and Will Hay. Hare is still marvellous as the incarnation of timid bourgeois respectability, but Walls - here afflicted by an awful Oirish brogue - is terribly hammy, and the appeal of Lynn's silly-ass antics defies comprehension. That said, the Aldwych farces, enormously popular in the inter-war years, are a part of English history, and this one is a relatively painless introduction to their standard routines and characterisations. Walls is an appalling director, but with one of Ben Travers' few original screenplays, and the photography of Arthur Crabtree and Roy Kellino - two of Britain's most gifted cameramen - the moonlit meanderings around Wrotten Abbey look refreshingly un-stagebound.