Todd’s Movie Blog

I’m Benny Hill fan from way back, catching him in syndication in the early eighties, I watched his show through much of junior high and high school. So when I saw the library had an old movie of his from the fifties called Who Done It? and it was produced at Ealing Studios, who made all of those great Alec Guinness comedies like The Lady Killers and The Man In the White Suit, I immediately checked it out and tried to avoid recklessly driving home to pop it in the VCR, only to be ultimately disappointed with the film.
Benny plays Hugo Dill, an inept extra at an ice follies show who is addicted to pulp detective stories, he destroys the show through an unbelievable set of contrivances and gets fired. But not to worry, he has also just won a hundred dollars and a bloodhound in a contest sponsored by his favorite magazine. Rushing out he quickly purchases a gun and sublets an actor agent’s old office, hiring as secretary one of the chorus girls he also got fired, not knowing she is also a professional strong woman. His first client turns out to be a woman looking for stage work because her last agent dropped her for being too old, only Dill thinks it’s a divorce case, made worse for him when he spies the man with his new secretary, who was looking for stage work. All this confusion brings him to the attention of some foreign spies who have an embassy across the street from the agent Dill is spying on. They hire him to impersonate a scientist they are trying to sneak out of England, they plan to kill Dill and make it look like the scientist is dead.
While the plot is serviceable and Benny gives it his all, the film unfortunately falls completely flat. The reason is obvious, instead of scripting a film around Hill’s talents, he is thrown into a hodge podge of detective and spy cliches and forced to play it straight. Ealing seemed only interested in casting him due to his TV celebrity (his long running show had premiered on BBC the previous year). Even worst is that Benny is portrayed as an idiot, something he never did on TV. His characters may have been accident prone or seem to suffer at the hands of fate, but they were never this bone headed stupid. Part of his appeal was the clever and unorthodox way he would get out of scrapes, here he just blunders in and is constantly rescued by his super strong girl Friday, heck she’s even the one who figures everything out, Benny ends the film as oblivious as when he started.
The only real interest in getting this film is to see Benny at the start of his TV career or if you are a die hard completest.  Everybody else should stick to his Thames TV show.