My Learned Friend My Learned Friend is a British film comedy starring Will Hay . Hay also co-directed this 1943 film , along with regular collaborator Basil Dearden . The supporting cast included Claude Hulbert , Mervyn Johns and Ernest Thesiger . Plot Spoiler warning : Plot and/or ending details follow . Hay plays a seedy lawyer who finds himself marked for assassination by a criminal he unsuccessfully defended in the past . He teams up with an incompetent solicitor to try and prevent the deaths of other 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 . External link My Learned Friend at the Internet Movie Database  This 1940s comedy film -related article is a stub . You can help Wikipedia by expanding it . Categories : 1943 films | British films | Comedy films | Black and white films | 1940s comedy film stubs 0036184 My Learned Friend 