MartinHafer When the film begins, an elderly man is dying...and he commits a prank on his way out of this world. But it's not his final prank...that comes in his will. When it's read to his four relatives, they're each told they'd receive 50,000 pounds...provided each do something odd and specifically tailored to them. His haughty sister is told that in order to collect, she must become a domestic and serve as one for a year. His cousin, the writer, must act out his dime novels...and get himself incarcerated for 28 days. His meek relative must hold up a bank with a fake gun...and his playboy cousin must marry the first woman with which he strikes up a conversation! And, all of these must be completed without telling anyone why they are doing it! What made this one especially good is that, for the most part, the folks all learned a positive lesson from all this and there were also a few laughs along the way. Worth seeing and clever.

Spondonman I first saw this as a youngster and liked it, but over the years it's really grown on me until now I regard it as a minor classic. The main characters were all played excellently, with many lesser characters also played memorably.Practical joker Hugh Griffiths dies and leaves GBP 50,000 to each of his four living relatives if they complete various silly but onerous tasks within one month of his death. Pulp writer Alistair Sim, snobby Fay Compton, womaniser Guy Middleton and timid George Cole are all faced with problems that are against their natures, and their attempts to succeed ultimately result in a worthy moral and laughter on Earth. Cole's "juvenile" sections used to irritate me when younger but there's plenty else to savour, especially the incomparable Sim as a determined shoplifter, Compton as a harassed skivvy and Middleton as a hornswoggled suitor. As icing on the cake there's also fluffy Joyce Grenfell, scathing John Laurie, suave Anthony Steel, jolly Ernest Thesiger, and many other old friends – even the forever bald Noel Howlett and a young Audrey Hepburn. The direction and production values were top notch too; the sets were so beautifully wooden, the acting certainly was not.It's flimsy yet logical, life-affirming and recommended – stay with it to the end to have the last laugh.

Robert J. Maxwell Hugh Griffith, a terribly rich prankster, dies and splits his fortune up between four of his relatives on the condition that they fulfill certain obligations. In general, they must disclose the elements of the will to no one. And then there are specific requirements for each beneficiary.Fay Compton, Griffith's cousin, is a prune-like, bitter woman who dominates her friends and excoriates her maid for slight infractions. Her job is to find work as a maid for one week without being fired. She winds up in the household of the cantankerous, bossy, hypochondriac John Laurie, who does a fine number on the fast-talking sadist. He was the Scottish farmer in "The 39 Steps" who asked, "Do ye eat the herring?" George Cole is the mousy bank teller who must don a mask and pretend to hold up a bank with a water pistol.Guy Middleton is the picaresque moocher and ladies' man who must marry the first woman he talks to after the reading of the will is complete.Alistair Sim, the survivor-in-chief, is a respectable retired Army captain who writes Mickey Spillane novels under various noms de plume in order to preserve his dignity. His job is to commit a crime that causes him to spend 28 days in prison.All four of the beneficiaries undergo complications of one sort or another. Some are funnier than others. Cole earns respect by accident at his bank. Compton's story is meant to be heartwarming. Middleton ends up the victim of a plot himself. All of them learn something about life and about themselves, and find their situations improved, despite the final prank of the great prankster.Sim's story is the funniest and he handles the comedy flawlessly. Like Charles Laughton in that O. Henry story, he can't seem to get himself into jail. His attempt at shop lifting is foiled when the expensive item he steals is stolen from him by pickpockets. The most amusing scene in the film is Sim's trial for breaking a window and bopping a cop with his umbrella. The magistrate turns out to be a friend of his and is reluctant to prosecute him. But Sim prods him mercilessly and offers no defense. Very well, he gets 14 days in the slams. That's not enough. He needs 28 days. So he calls his friend a pompous ass. The sympathetic magistrate becomes insulted and adds another 7 days. That's still only 21 -- not yet enough. Sim affirms his insult and adds that the judge isn't fit to conduct a bus let alone a courtroom trial. Boiled down like this, it probably sounds less amusing that it appears on screen.It's not hilarious. It's not a masterpiece of the sort that Ealing Studios were turning out in the 1950s. It shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as a side-splitting comedy like "The L_________s." But you'll find it diverting.

dougdoepke Alastair Sim would make a perfect undertaker. With those Bassett-hound eyes and that mournful hand-wringing manner, he's made to preside over the Slumber Room and ease you into the priciest model. So, it never fails to surprise me that he's also a first-rate comedic actor, maybe even the last word in droll comedy. And he pulls off the humor so slyly, with just a minor change of expression. What a wonderfully artistic contrast he is to today's rub- your-nose-in-it brand of comedy. This is not his best vehicle, but the movie does have a clever premise and a couple of good set-ups—the shoplifting sequence, and any scene with Joyce Grenfell. The sketches, however, are more amusing than hilarious, and the humor never really peaks out in a climactic way. It's also perhaps one of the sweetest comedies on record, insisting that the key to happiness is pairing up with another, even in the case of those two cranky old people. That's the wisdom behind the will's requirement— old man Russell makes each beneficiary experience what is most missing from his or her life, and in the process, become a better and happier person.Note the shot taken early on at America's brand of hard-boiled detective fiction, probably then making inroads into popular British fiction. So, by combining America's street- tough style with traditional British prose, writer Russell (Sim) produces something amusingly ridiculous, like "Petal arched her alabaster arm above her patrician brow in a moment of precise exasperation before he smacked her in the kisser." Anyway, I thought those passages were both funny and cleverly offbeat. All in all, this little comedy may be no knee-slapper, but it is rather sweetly memorable.