I'm All Right Jack (1960)

Best movie of this year hands down!

What makes it different from others?

Better Late Then Never

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This is a breathtakingly bold and audacious satirical film which was frankly unprecedented for British cinema in the 1950s. Peter Sellers stars in a serious role, played half-straight and half-caricatured, as a labour union shop steward and 'Chairman of the Works Committee' at a factory of an arms firm called Missiles Limited. The film was written and directed by John Boulting and produced by his brother Roy Boulting. The well-know comedian of the time, Terry-Thomas, plays a scheming capitalist fraudster. Ian Carmichael excels as an upper middle class twit of unparalleled naivety and idiocy who gets a job as an ordinary worker and discovers that he loves it, leading to all sorts of class complications. He had been directed by John Boulting three years earlier in PRIVATE'S PROGRESS (1956, see my review), where he was even more brilliant. One of the best and most hilarious performances is by Irene Handl, that marvellous cockney character actress who tells everybody where to get off in no uncertain terms, and in this instance, her husband Peter Sellers (an earlier incarnation of Jeremy Corbyn). The cast also includes Dennis Price, Margaret Rutherford, Victor Maddern, the deliciously droll and hilarious glamour gal Liz Fraser, John Le Mesurier, Kenneth Griffith, and Raymond Huntley. In other words, just about everybody who was anybody in British film comedy at the time is in the film, the only actor seeming slightly ill at ease being Attenborough, who was never good at being funny. The Boulting Brothers certainly pulled this off, and the film is a famous classic. Their portrayal of corporate corruption was done with first-hand knowledge, as they were expert at ripping off their own company themselves, as I know from personal experience, when I refused to cooperate with them in a fraudulent transaction, so I do know what I am talking about. They were brilliantly talented but they were corrupt when it came to money and were quite brazen about it. So this film rips the lid off the most amazing collection of national hypocrisies, and we nearly die laughing and gasping with delight at the film's ingenuity and breath-taking boldness.

Anyone who thinks Old British films are 'quaint' should watch this, one of the sharpest satires ever made. A finer film on industrial relations has never been made and I doubt could be made now in the current climate of intellectual dishonesty. The film makers do not take the easy route in blaming one party or another but holds them all up to scrutiny. The bosses, the unionists, the clients are all (rightly) shown as self motivated and cynical. Fred Kite is a character very familiar even in modern British politics (Bob Crowe still thinks and talks very much like him), with his hilariously Utopian views on the impoverished horror state of the USSR "fields of corn and ballet in the evening". The bunkum of the bosses is hardly less true and delightful to behold.

An intellectual from Oxford--so studious he has become a naive rube in the real world, and unable to find his niche in the working place--takes a manual labor position at his nefarious uncle's factory, where he stirs up a tempest with the labor relations team. Screenwriter Alan Hackney, co-adapting his book "Private Life" with Frank Harvey and director John Boulting, hit upon a certain observant ridiculousness in the British class system with his then-trenchant satire. While Hackney's targets are scattered (and obvious or dated by now), the supporting performances from Peter Sellers (well-disguised as the middle-aged labor leader), Terry-Thomas, Richard Attenborough, Dennis Price, Liz Fraser, and Margaret Rutherford are certainly worth a look. ** from ****

I waited until I watched Private's Progress to get a feel for these characters from where they originated before writing about I'm All Right Jack. The only question was how did at least two of the repeating characters get out of the jackpot they were left in the previous film in order to be characters here. By all rights Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough should have been doing some time in Her Majesty's jail.Price and Attenborough, along with Terry-Thomas and Ian Carmichael repeat their characters from Private's Progress. World War II is over and somehow everybody's back to where they were before, Price and Attenborough up to some nefarious scheme, Ian Carmichael still a polished, but mindless upper class twit who can't even fit in at university and Terry-Thomas just being Terry-Thomas.Carmichael is almost Stan Laurel like in his innocence about all that goes on around him. He joins the working class work force and he muddles into a situation that has the potential to destroy labor/ management relations built up from World War II and the Labour government that took power. Especially if radical union leader Peter Sellers has his way, who joins this cast and fits right into the fun.A lot of the same themes are repeated from the Alec Guinness classic The Man In The White Suit and really both ought to be seen back to back unless one wants to view I'm All Right Jack with Private's Progress. Either way it's a fun filled evening you're in store for.