A Jolly Bad Fellow

• Leo McKern as Prof Bowles-Ottery
• Janet Munro as Delia Brooks
• Maxine Audley as Clarina Bowles-Ottery
• Duncan Macrae as Dr Brass
• Dennis Price as Prof Hughes
• Miles Malleson as Dr Woolley
• Leonard Rossiter as Dr Fisher
• Alan Wheatley as Epicene
• Patricia Jessel as Mrs Pugh-Smith
• Dinsdale Landen as Fred
• George Benson as Inspector Butts.[1]

Kerris Bowles-Ottery is professor of science at the University of Ockham. To advance his career, he poisons inconvenient colleagues with an untraceable substance he has discovered that induces hysteria and manic behaviour followed by death. His research assistant, Delia, blackmails him into a promise of marriage, but he remains attached to his wife, and poisons Delia. 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.[1]

In a 2017 study of Bryanston Films, Duncan Petrie writes that the film did not make "any impact either commercially or critically"[2] When the film was released in the US (under the title They All Died Laughing), The New York Times called it "nonconformist but not especially sidesplitting" although having "a deftly casual air about it as well as the polish of professionalism".[3]

• A Jolly Bad Fellow at IMDb
• A Jolly Bad Fellow at Rotten Tomatoes