When the police arrive at his home to question him, he flees in his car but fatally crashes it as a result of smoking a poisoned cigarette that his wife has unknowingly brought from his laboratory.

[9] Variety called it "the type of witty, offbeat comedy that used to be a favorite of the oJd Ealing Films setup... a lighthearted entry entertaining while it lasts.

A Sir Michael Balcon production, with the late Robert Hamer sharing the script credit and a host of familiar character actors in the cast, it naturally arouses hopes of a renewal of the Ealing comedy tradition.

But that vein has been worked out and this is the second recent British film to demonstrate that you cannot really rejuvenate an outworn formula simply by throwing in a bit of social comment and a few snide references to television.

Like Nothing But the Best, A Jolly Bad Fellow is full of echoes – Genevieve, Kind Hearts, Brief Encounter, even the early films of Ralph Richardson, whose mannerisms have been inherited by Leo McKern.

Don Chaffey's direction manages to be both flat and fussy – the business with the poisoned cigarettes being worked literally and figuratively to death – and there is an irritatingly jaunty score for "jazz organ" which makes one think wistfully of Larry Adler.