Movie: When the Cat’s Away

 

Many readers of this blog probably remember Will Hay, an English comedian famous for his schoolmaster persona that started out in music hall and variety and later transferred to radio and films becoming popular across the world.

The basic idea was simple. Will Hay was an incompetent schoolmaster who had attained his teaching position by fraud. He bumbled through his lessons. His class was made up of dim schoolboys who were so ignorant they were unable to graduate school. Therefore, they were all played by adults and sometimes older adults at that.

We met Will Hay before here and the two schoolmaster films he is most remembered for Good Morning Boys and Boys Will Be Boys.

Here’s a little-known clip from 1928 found in the British Pathé archives. It’s an extract from “When the Cat’s Away the Mice Will Play.”

According to the archive, a young schoolboy [obviously played by an adult] stands at a blackboard and draws an unflattering cartoon of his teacher. The boy wears a mortar board. An old man gets up from a school desk and laughs about it. The boy then puts some ink on the cloth that the teacher will use to clean the board. The two sit together at their desks.

There’s a section of the film missing here in which shows Will Hay wiping his face with the blackboard duster and getting covered with ink

Will Hay stands at the board in his teacher's outfit. (The board is now clean). He begins to write something on the board. It is illegible until he turns the board upside down to reveal that it says: “Silence in this school.”

Hay has black ink all around his mouth so presumably some funny business with the inky rag is missing.

The boy puts his hand up to ask or answer a question. He then opens the classroom door to reveal a woman waiting outside. She comes into the class. There’s a close-up of Hay looking like a madman with ink all over his chops and a small pair of pince-nez on the tip of his nose, he speaks obsequiously to the woman. There’s a close-up of her putting her hand up to her face as she laughs. He looks annoyed, she laughs uproariously. as do the two pupils. She laughs and points at his face.

He looks in the mirror and gets very cross. He grabs the boy, throws him over the desk and gives him a good caning!

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