❛ Wherever you look, it’s a case of “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right”. ❜

(Stanley Windrush)

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The Boulting Brothers created some of postwar Britain’s most distinctive films across several genres, but it is their joyous 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack that stands tallest in the film-making twin brothers’ oeuvre of cinematic comedy classics.

I’m All Right Jack takes up pretty much where it’s prequel, Private’s Progress, left off. The protagonist of both movies is the gullible and seemingly gormless Stanley Windrush (played to a tee by Ian Carmichael). Naive and good-natured, the persona of Stanley can be best summed up as epitomising the bungling, accident-prone, upper class twit.

In Private’s Progress Windrush “pussyfoots” his way through his army war service, causing unintended mayhem and allowing himself inadvertently to be duped…then by mistake he precipitates a chain of events leading to the capture of a division of enemy German soldiers and ends up an accidental war hero of sorts!

In I’m All Right Jack the Boultings reprise several of the previous film’s characters and actors…as well as ‘Stanley’ there is his scheming, unscrupulous “Uncle Bertie”, Bertram Tracepurcel (played by the urbane Dennis Price) and his harassed personnel manager, “Major Hitchcock” (the gap-toothed “professional cad” Terry-Thomas). Richard Attenborough plays “Sydney Cox”, Tracepurcel’s co-conspirator in perfidy and supposedly Stanley’s old friend from the war – the smoothest of smooth con men!

Ian Carmichael (Stanley) ◬ with ‘IARJ’ co-star Liz Fraser

I’m All Right Jack satirises 1950s British society, still coming out of the straitjacket of postwar austerity, with sabre-like sharpness. The Boultings’ film fixes its microscope on industrial relations in a missiles production factory, exposing both the bosses and its blue collar workforce as unconscionable and utterly self-serving, solely out for what they can get for themselves! The Boulting brothers are “equal opportunity satirisers”, skewering management and labour alike to a commensurate degree. For both sides of the workplace divide, self-interest is unchallengingly the “drug of choice”, hence the film’s title⍟. The Boutlings also dish up a few  barbs aimed at the fact-loose world of advertising along the way.

◬ Stanley’s bubble-car at the gate of Missiles Ltd

The film portrays the plant workers as work-shy and devious in their tunnel-visioned pursuit of the singular goal of doing less work than they are required to do✥…Stanley unknowingly upsets the “apple-cart” by demonstrating to the company’s T & M man (the ever-dour John Le Mesurier – another Boulting recruit from Private’s Progress) just how much work can actually be done in a day if one makes a “fair dinkum” effort (and of course this results in him being ostracised by the factory’s union). The factory management show themselves to be equally duplicitous – engaged in enriching themselves through a corrupt, clandestine arms deal with a swarthy, shonky Middle Eastern intermediary.

I’m All Right Jack also takes a comical pot shot at other societal institutions of the day – government for its torpid ineptitude, the English class system, advertising and the tabloid media for their falseness and alarming capacity to sway public opinion – lampooning each of them in turn! The Boultings are showing a Britain that is corrupt at its core, one that unearthed a late 1950s generation of “angry young men” dissatisfied with the blandness of society of the status quo [‘I’m All Right Jack review – Philip French on the Boulting brothers’ biting state-of-the-nation satire’, The Guardian, 18-Jan-2015, www.guardian.com].

Peter Sellers as Fred Kite is the movie’s stand-out, producing a gem of a performance. Kite is the comedy’s pivotal character, the chief shop steward who orchestrates the factory floor’s “go-slow” work culture, zealously obstructing management at every opportunity. “Red Fred” is your archetypal ‘Bolshy’ minor trade union official (with a Hitlerian moustache), but a union ‘heavy’ more ridiculous than menacing…a “Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his own class enemies” [Timeout, www.timeout.com]. Sellers’ ‘Kite’ is given to awkward, Gothic turns of phrase and a pompous, halting, almost robotic mode of speech…in his essence he is hilarious as a blinkered Sovietphile idealist: “Ahhh (he sighs wistfully), Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening”❂ [‘ I’m All Right Jack and The Organizer: Bread and Roses and a Lot of Laughs’, Criterion, (Michael Stragow), 19-Jan-2018, www.criterion.com].

Sellers as Kite (centre) ◬

The success of I’m All Right Jack (it was the number one box office hit in the UK for 1959 and winner of a BAFTA award) triggered a number of British films focussing on the world of worker/management relations – including the diametrically different in tone The Angry Silence (1960) (also with Richard Attenborough).

The film climaxes with Stanley, having finally ‘twigged’ to the IR game he has unwittingly been a pawn in, exposing both sides for their greed and duplicity on national television. I’m All Right Jack ends with Stanley ‘retiring’ to a rural nudist colony…he is invited by a bevy of naked women, discretely obscured by a hedge (it was 1959 after all!) to a game of tennis. The characteristically nervous Stanley bolts at the suggestion and is last seen hareing full-tilt across a meadow frantically pursued by the bare damsels.

PostScript: A punchline for the nascent anti-Apartheid movement
The Boultings’ film resonated in unexpected circles. The New Zealand Rugby Union, unwilling to offend South Africa’s racist policy of non-contact between whites and non-whites in sport, declined to select any Māori players for the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa (the Nash Labour government was fully complicit in this gutless act of appeasement). The ensuing controversy provoked widespread protests within NZ (a call for “No Maoris, no tour”) and a most memorable placard inspired by the film: “I’m All White, Jack!”

(Photo: Marti Friedlander)
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✲ directed by John Boulting, produced by brother Roy, and written by John with Frank Harvey from a novel by Alan Hackney (the same creators of Private’s Progress)
⍟ “I’m All right Jack” (of naval origin) was a popular UK expression of the period, meant to signify a smug and complacent self-centredness
✥ a recurring Boulting theme…in both Private’s Progress and I’m All Right Jack Windrush enters a world of “gold-bricks”, people doggedly determined to go the last mile to evade work of any kind
❂ apparently BBC Television in 1979 canned a scheduled screening of I’m All Right Jack for fear that Sellers’ ‘Kite’ might prejudice viewers against the Labour Party in an upcoming election! [ibid.]