Who Done It? Movie Review

You either love Benny Hill or you don't. If you do, you'll get a kick out of seeing him in his first movie. Hill is Hugo, a mystery buff who reads Date with Death when he's supposed to be working at his job at an ice show. He wins money in a contest for amateur detectives and decides to use it to make himself a real private eye. Only in the movies! He gets mixed up in some gobbledygook with spies and scientists and the lovely Belinda Lee as Frankie. Anyone who sees the late comic star on television knows that he has the sexual maturity of Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, which is to say ZERO! When we see him with a gorgeous blonde who's much tougher physically than he is, he seems like an overgrown schoolboy who can't believe his luck. I miss Benny Hill (1925–92), whose comic routines are considered too low-brow by everyone but the millions who continue to laugh at his shows on videotape. I'm not putting him in the same artistic league as Charlie Chaplin, but when early film archivists began to think about what to save, Chaplin's flickers were considered by some to be too low-brow for preservation. Luckily, they were saved, anyway. And luckily for Benny Hill buffs and those with fond memories of the Ealing comedies of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the silly goofiness of Who Done It? has been saved as well.

1956 85m/B GB Benny Hill, Belinda Lee, David Kossoff, Ernest Thesiger, Garry Marsh, George Margo, Denis Shaw, Fred Schiller, Jeremy Hawk, Thorley Walters, Philip Stainton, Stratford Johns; D: Basil Dear-den; W: T.E.B. Clarke; C: Otto Heller; M: Philip Green. VHS, Closed Caption