My Learned Friend

My Learned Friend
Directed by	Basil Dearden Will Hay
Produced by	Michael Balcon Robert Hamer S.C. Balcon (assoc.)
Written by	John Dighton Angus MacPhail
Starring	Will Hay Ronald Shiner Charles Victor
Editing by	Charles Hasse
Running time	74 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

My Learned Friend is a 1943 British, black-and-white, comedy, farce, directed by Basil Dearden, co-directed with regular collaborator Will Hay and starring Ronald Shiner as the Man in Wilson's café, Will Hay as William Fitch and Charles Victor as "Safety" Wilson. It was produced by Michael Balcon, Robert Hamer and Ealing Studios. The film's title refers to a tradition in British law: when addressing either the court or the judge, a barrister refers to the opposing counsel uses the respectful term, "my learned friend". The supporting cast included Claude Hulbert, Mervyn Johns and Ernest Thesiger.

Plot summary

This comedy sees Will Hay playing a seedy lawyer, who finds himself marked for assassination by a forger that he defended unsuccessfully, in the past. He teams up with an incompetent solicitor to try to prevent the deaths of others involved.

The film climaxes with a sequence where Hay hangs from the hands of the clock face of Big Ben in an attempt to prevent a time bomb being detonated.

This scene was later borrowed for the 1978 version of The Thirty-Nine Steps and for the Jackie Chan film Shanghai Knights in 2003.

Reference to previous film

During one scene of this film, set in a saloon bar, Mervyn Johns appears in a disguise that parodies the character he played in an earlier movie, Saloon Bar.

External links

• My Learned Friend at AllRovi
• My Learned Friend at the BFI Film & TV Database
• My Learned Friend at the Internet Movie Database