Monthly Archives: August 2025

  • I’m All Right Jack

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Boulting (1959)

    This Boulting brothers comedy was second only to Carry On Nurse at the British box office in 1959.  Plenty of those who bought tickets would already have been familiar with most of I’m All Right Jack’s main characters.  The picture became enduringly famous thanks to a newcomer – Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite, the hidebound, humourless shop steward – but Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Terry-Thomas and Miles Malleson were all back in roles they’d played in the Boultings’ Private’s Progress (1956), which also did well commercially at the time.  I don’t recall having seen Private’s Progress and don’t think I’d seen I’m All Right Jack since I was a teenager.  Watching it now, as part of BFI’s Peter Sellers season (2025 marks the centenary of his birth), I was surprised by how laboured – no pun intended – the film is, and that I struggled to understand key parts of the plot.  I’m guessing that wasn’t the case for audiences in 1959 and was thanks partly to the now relatively obscure Private’s Progress.   

    Both films derive from novels by Alan Hackney, who worked with John Boulting and Frank Harvey on the screenplay for I’m All Right Jack.  According to the Guardian’s obituary of Hackney in 2009, Private’s Progress was inspired by observation of the ‘lead-swinging comrades and the upper-class twits who commanded them during [Hackney’s] wartime period at Maidstone barracks and at camps in India’.  The British army in World War II is replaced in I’m All Right Jack by post-war British industry, peopled by ineptly corrupt bosses, workshy workers and tunnel-visioned trade unionists.  This lampoon of late 1950s Britain extends beyond the workplace, too.  Fred Kite’s dumb-blonde daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), has a job in the factory where her father plies his trade unionism; outside working hours, she’s usually reading inane film-fan mags or playing inane pop records.  Cynthia’s pastimes are dubious in ways the filmmakers maybe didn’t wholly intend.  Her reading matter smacks of the Boultings biting the hand that was feeding them; the single on her record-player is I’m All Right Jack’s title song, already played over the opening credits, sung by Al Saxon.  Written by Ken Hare, the song certainly is primitive although the lyrics express what apparently is the film’s political point of view – that contemporary Britain is deplorable because everyone’s out for himself.

    This is implied even in I’m All Right Jack’s curious prologue, where Peter Sellers appears in a second role – a cameo as elderly Sir John Kennaway, dozing in the otherwise deserted smoking room of a London gentleman’s club.  A waiter comes in to break the news that World War II is over; cheering is heard through an open window that Sir John asks the waiter to close.  A voiceover (E V H Emmett) enjoins viewers to ‘Look hard, for this is the last we shall see of Sir John’.  After reeling off his CV – Justice of the Peace, Chairman of this, Vice-President of that – the voice describes Sir John as ‘a solid block in the edifice of what seemed to be an ordered and stable society’.  As he heads for the smoking room exit, the voice concludes, ‘There he goes – on his way out.  For with victory came a new age, and with that age a new spirit’.  This is followed by newsreel footage of London’s VE Day celebrations – on the Buckingham Palace balcony, Churchill gives a V for Victory sign to the crowds below.  John Boulting then inserts a squaddie (Victor Maddern, who’ll shortly reappear as a factory worker) giving the camera a different V sign.  Cue the opening titles, jokey cartoon images accompanied by the theme song:

    ‘I’m all right, Jack, I’m OK

    That is the message for today

    So count up your lolly, feather your nest,

    Let someone else worry, boy,

    I couldn’t care less …’

    The juxtaposition of the club scene and those titles is disorienting.  As you watch the prologue, you think it’s there just to whet your appetite for a display of Peter Sellers’ chameleonic genius – and to make fun of the old codger in the club.  As soon as Al Saxon starts singing, you’re bound to wonder if we’re really meant to be nostalgic for the likes of Sir John Kennaway, never mind there’s been nothing to suggest he’s notably altruistic.  Isn’t this taking the film too seriously?  No, because, for all its popular success, this wasn’t Carry On Nurse:  I’m All Right Jack received plenty of critical praise as incisive satire, though it’s too slapdash to merit the description.  John and Roy Boulting (the latter, as usual, produced) probably did include that prologue just to showcase Sellers and probably didn’t truly lament Sir John Kennaway’s passing (not least because his type surely wasn’t extinct anyway).  He just seemed slightly preferable to what they saw as Britain’s emerging ruling classes.

    I’m All Right Jack‘s central character is Ian Carmichael’s Stanley Windrush (Alan Hackney could never have imagined that Stanley’s surname would be resonating decades on for different reasons).  Oxford educated but devoid of common sense, Stanley fancies a job in industrial management – nothing too onerous, mind – but is such a silly arse that he flunks every interview:  the recruitment agency tells him he’s not cut out for the world of business.  Stanley lives with his rich great aunt (Margaret Rutherford), whose son, Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price), calls to see her one day, along with a business colleague, Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough).  This duo, who served with Stanley in World War II, invite him to work at Tracepurcel’s factory, Missiles Ltd.  Stanley is thrilled until he learns it’s a blue-collar job.  He thinks that’s infra dig and Aunt Dolly is appalled at the prospect of a family member rubbing shoulders with the working class, but Stanley uneasily agrees to join his uncle’s firm.

    I spent most of what followed wondering why Tracepurcel and Cox were keen to engage Stanley’s services – despite the furtive meaningful looks exchanged by Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough as they make him the offer, and the nature of their cunning plan soon emerging.  Missiles Ltd has landed a big contract to manufacture arms for a country in the Middle East.  Cox owns another company, Union Jack Foundries.  He and Tracepurcel, in cahoots with the Middle Eastern government’s representative, Mr Mohammed (Marne Maitland), mean to procure the contract instead for Union Jack Foundries, at an increased production rate and thereby a hugely inflated cost that will net the trio £100,000, split three ways.  Missiles Ltd’s personnel manager, Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), has commissioned a time and motion study.  Sucker Stanley, who spends his days in the factory at the wheel of a forklift truck, helpfully demonstrates to the T&M man, Waters (John Le Mesurier), that work can be done much more quickly if you load more on the truck in one go than he and the other drivers have been instructed to do.  On receipt of Waters’ report, management demands higher productivity.  Fred Kite calls a strike to protect his members’ rates of pay.  Missiles Ltd is in chaos – just what Tracepurcel, Cox and Mohammed were hoping for – and thanks to Stanley.

    This is where Private’s Progress knowledge must have come in handy.  Those acquainted with Stanley Windrush already knew him as a genial hopeless case with a talent only for guilelessly doing the wrong thing:  in the earlier film, by being honest, he ends up arrested for fraud, along with the actual fraudsters, Tracepurcel and Cox.  The premise of I’m All Right Jack is seemingly that Stanley is so reliably liable to cause chaos that the other two can count on it – there’s no other apparent reason to recruit him.  The cunning plan finally misfires, of course.  Tracepurcel and Cox are smart enough to be sure that Stanley will somehow wreak havoc but not smart enough to foresee that the workers at Union Jack Foundries will down tools in sympathy with their union brothers at Missiles Ltd.  The only motivation for another important part of the storyline – Fred Kite invites Stanley to lodge with him and his family, Stanley accepts the invitation because he likes the look of Cynthia – is that the Boultings need this set-up for what happens subsequently.  (A suggestion that Kite sees Stanley as a potential pupil, eagerly devouring the contents of Fred’s anti-capitalist library, comes and goes within a few screen seconds.)  The filmmakers’ only excuse for implausibility is that I’m All Right Jack is just-a-comedy-after-all.

    It’s not that funny, though.  Early on, there’s the strenuous humour of Stanley’s failed interviews:  at a washing powder company, where he asks an executive (John Glyn-Jones) just the wrong questions; on a tour of a confectionery factory, where Stanley is too polite to reject repeated offers from the supervisor (Ronnie Stevens) to sample the products, and ends up spewing the lot back into factory machinery.  At the film’s climax, Stanley causes a riot in a television studio.  By this stage, he has brought the country to the verge of a general strike and is a national celebrity.  When the union, led by Kite, sends Stanley to Coventry, he becomes a hero in the press – a man who’s being punished for working hard.  He appears, alongside Kite, Cox and Tracepurcel, on a live TV panel discussion programme chaired by (the real) Malcolm Muggeridge.  In the dressing room beforehand, Cox tries to bribe Stanley to resign, supposedly on health grounds, and presents him with a suitcase crammed with banknotes.  On air, the exasperated Stanley reveals the bribe and starts throwing the money around.  The studio audience, acquisitive to a man and woman, goes on the rampage trying to get their hands on the cash – a sequence that seems to go on forever.

    After the prologue, the film’s first scene takes place in the Sunnyglades nudist camp, where Stanley’s father (Miles Malleson) is a long-term resident and a group of much younger female nudists are keen but confessedly inept tennis players.  A tennis ball lands beside old Mr Windrush’s table.  Stanley, who’s visiting his father, is deputed to hand the ball back to the ladies; fully dressed and excruciatingly embarrassed, he reluctantly does so.  In I‘m All Right Jack‘s closing sequence, Windrush fils has joined his father as a Sunnyglades resident.  Stanley is quietly reading his newspaper when the tennis team invites him to join their game.  He’s last seen running for his life, wearing just the newspaper for cover, the giggling women in close pursuit – as if to suggest we’ve been watching a Carry On after all.

    The narrative is punctuated throughout by the familiar tones of E V H Emmett.  Best known as the voice of Gaumont British News, he gives the film’s leaden ironic commentary the right touch of pompous authority.  It’s fortunate that there are richer compensations to be had from many of the high-powered cast of I’m All Right Jack.  The film made a particularly strong impact because it skewered not only underhand management practices in British industry but also, and unusually, organised labour.  (It therefore came to be thought of as politically reactionary albeit the Boultings may have meant to be even-handed in their treatment of the two sides.)  And Fred Kite, who’s obviously crucial to this, is an unusual performance from Peter Sellers:  he supplies occasional glimpses of something vulnerably human behind Kite’s Hitler moustache, mangled English, and rulebook cant and cliches.  The solemn respect that Kite receives from his union colleagues is in short supply away from work.  At home with his candid wife (excellent Irene Handl), Fred’s an interesting combination.  He’s on the verge of henpecked yet rules the roost in the sense that Mrs Kite always has his dinner on the table the moment he comes in.  Until, that is, she loses patience with the strike shenanigans and goes on strike herself, leaving the house and her husband in the domestic lurch.

    It goes without saying Fred’s helpless without his wife, who has taken Cynthia with her.  A camera pan across the kitchen debris that has piled up in their absence is an unpromising start to what turns into one of the film’s most surprisingly appealing scenes, when Hitchcock, dispatched by Tracepurcel to negotiate with Kite, arrives at his house to find Fred in an apron.  Both men get something out of the meeting.  The shop steward comes up with the suggestion that Stanley leave Missiles Ltd for made-up ill-health reasons while the Major darns a hole in one of Fred’s socks.  In fact, this is the second nice tête-à-tête between chalk-and-cheese characters who find common ground.  Great Aunt Dolly has also paid a visit to the Kite residence, demanding to see Stanley while he’s still lodging there.  She starts off declining even to sit down, apparently nervous she might catch some dirty proletarian infection by doing so; she ends up on the sofa drinking tea with Mrs Kite.  These exchanges, as well as amusingly conceived, are a tribute to the actors involved, even if Margaret Rutherford and Terry-Thomas, at least, were doing just what audiences expected them to do.  It really shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is to hear Terry-Thomas describing the Missiles workforce as an ‘absolute shower’, and so on.

    The film is cannily cast.  Stanley Windrush ought to be annoying but it’s impossible not to warm to the man playing him.  Ian Carmichael is game for anything, from his bilious routine in the sweets factory to his desperate closing business with the newspaper.  What’s so good about Carmichael’s performance, apart from his comic timing, is how deftly he registers Stanley’s distress every time he gets things wrong.  Stanley is so evidently a toff that it’s rather meaningless when he eventually confesses at work to being Tracepurcel’s nephew – or it would be without Ian Carmichael’s showing that coming clean matters to Stanley.  In the smaller parts, featuring a great many more familiar faces, Victor Maddern is particularly good.  With the qualified exception of Peter Sellers, whose versatility was sui generis, Richard Attenborough had a much wider acting range than anyone else in the cast.  Although Attenborough’s peculiar accent makes Sidney De Vere Cox interestingly hard to place socially, he’s a thin conception.  The following year, in Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, Attenborough would play a more substantial character in a more serious British film about contemporary industrial relations.

    16 August 2025

     

  • My Beautiful Laundrette

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1985)

    It wasn’t the first ‘British Asian’ film:  Peter K Smith’s A Private Enterprise (1974), in which an Indian immigrant tries to start his own business in Birmingham, made it to British cinema screens a decade earlier.  But My Beautiful Laundrette’s recognition on both sides of the Atlantic was new for a story told chiefly from a British-Asian perspective.  That story – set in South London in the heyday of Thatcher’s Britain, with the racism of young National Front types, working-class but unemployed, much in evidence – gives Stephen Frears’ film historical specificity yet it still resonates forty years on.  My Beautiful Laundrette is very entertaining into the bargain.

    Frears had made his first cinema feature, Gumshoe, back in 1971 but the next one, The Hit, didn’t appear until 1984.  In the meantime, he’d become a reliably successful director of TV drama, especially Alan Bennett pieces, and My Beautiful Laundrette, which runs a little over ninety minutes, was conceived and made for television.  (Four or five definite pauses in the action show at what points the commercial breaks would have come.)  The film was so enthusiastically received at an Edinburgh Festival screening that the production companies involved – Film 4 and Working Title – thought again.  An unexpected release in cinemas soon followed.

    Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay draws on his own family background and upbringing to dramatise various oppositions.  The central character is Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke), a British Pakistani in his early twenties, the only child of first-generation immigrants to Britain.  Omar’s widowed father Hussein (Roshan Seth), once an eminent left-wing journalist in Pakistan (he was close to Zulfikar Ai Bhutto), now spends most of his time in bed with a bottle of vodka for company.  His wife’s recent suicide has deepened Hussein’s disillusion but he still believes in education enough to want Omar, his de facto carer, to go to college.  Hussein’s brother, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), a successful local businessman, has other ideas.  Nasser has any number of irons in the fire.  He’s a car dealer, a shop owner, a slum landlord.  His right-hand man, Salim (Derrick Branche), has sidelines in drugs trafficking and porn videos.  Omar works briefly as a car washer in one of Nasser’s garages before getting a different detergent assignment.  He starts looking after another of his uncle’s properties, a dilapidated laundrette.

    Omar is also part-time chauffeur to Salim and his wife Cherry (Souad Faress).  Their drive home one night is interrupted by a gaggle of white racist lowlifes, among them Johnny Burfoot (Daniel Day-Lewis), Omar’s schoolfriend, with whom he’s lost touch since Johnny drifted into the NF, petty crime and vagrancy.  (He’s first seen in the film moving hurriedly out of one squat, in search of the next.)  Johnny accepts Omar’s invitation to help him renovate the laundrette:  they manage to complete the refurb by selling one of Salim’s narcotics deliveries and pocketing the cash.  The place is relaunched as ‘Powders’, with splashy décor and signage – as laundrettes go, it’s comically chic.  Omar’s involvement of Johnny in the project is a matter of romantic as much as business enterprise.  In the minutes before Powders’ grand opening (complete with ribbon-cutting), the two young men are making love on the premises, in a back room.

    Omar and Johnny are invisible to locals queuing in the street outside but the same can’t be said for Nasser and his white mistress, Rachel (Shirley Anne Field), who, to the queue’s amusement, are dancing to the Skaters’ Waltz beside the washing machines.  This almost whimsical moment, one of several in the film, is part of what makes My Beautiful Laundrette so distinctive; the Skaters’ Waltz is part of Powders’ eclectic muzak; and Rachel is a key part of Nasser’s conflicting drives.  A prominent member of the Pakistani community, he’s ethnically traditional enough to try to arrange his daughters’ marriages – and sees his nephew as a future husband for the eldest, independent-minded Tania (Rita Wolf).  But Nasser is also an enthusiastic Thatcherite and Rachel is an expression of his determination to flourish ‘in this damn country, which we hate and love’.

    Rachel’s eventual departure from Nasser’s life is ironically apt.  His more simply traditional wife, Bilquis (Charu Bala Choksi), embittered by his adultery, cooks up potions and pronounces a ritual curse on Rachel, whose white skin develops a nasty rash.  Rachel, to Nasser’s dismay, decides it’s best if he and she part company.  Tania also finally disappears from the film, literally but ambiguously.  Hussein and Omar’s home looks out on a railway line, perhaps the same one where, we’re told, Omar’s mother ended her life.   Tania, who strongly disapproves both of Rachel and of having her own future arranged by her father, especially with a cousin who prefers boys, stands on the railway platform with her suitcase.  Nasser, on Hussein’s balcony, catches sight of his daughter and yells at her to come back.  A passing train obscures her from view.  It doesn’t stop at the station but, once the train has passed, Tania is no longer on the platform.

    Before My Beautiful Laundrette, Hanif Kureishi had written exclusively for the theatre.  Although the chalk-and-cheese outlooks of Hussein and Nasser might suggest stage dialectic, Kureishi’s first screenplay marks an impressively smooth transition to another writing medium.  Some of the little verbal touches are very effective.  The key location, before its makeover as Powders, is ‘Churchill’s Laudrette’, a symbol of tired old post-war England.  Even better is Omar’s pet name within the family:  ‘Omo’ is more than a prophesy of his future in laundrette management …  That said, the script doesn’t really explore the implications of Omar’s and Johnny’s sexuality.  This feels like an omission, particularly in Johnny’s case, given the political company he’s been keeping.  Kureishi’s writing is less fluent for a character like Rachel, who may not derive from autobiographical experience:  when Tania angrily accuses of Rachel of parasitism, the older woman’s supposedly poignant response isn’t really in her own voice (‘We’re of different generations, and different classes.  Everything is waiting for you. The only thing that has ever waited for me is your father’).  References to current British politics are cleverly sprinkled on the script, though.  The competing cultural allegiances that Omar’s father and uncle represent – to native land vs adopted country, to education vs moneymaking as means of acceptance in a new culture – aren’t repeatedly asserted in words but strongly in evidence in the storyline throughout.

    Watching My Beautiful Laundrette again (I’d seen it once before, decades ago), I wondered if Kureishi might have also drawn inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), whose protagonists are another pair of closely-bound young men – one straitened by conflicting cultural expectations, the other a charismatic wild child called Johnny (at one point in Laundrette, Johnny is referred to as ‘Johnny boy’).  Stephen Frears’ version of rough London is, however, very different from, and usually less dangerous than, Scorsese’s New York.  Frears’ lighter touch gives his film humour though it can also be a bit evasive.  The narrative is punctuated occasionally by an animated washing-machine door, spinning to the accompaniment of a glug-glug sound, and it raises a smile each time.  On the other hand, the white yobs are one-note characters (crudely played by Richard Graham and others).  Malign as they are, these kids are somehow redolent of the sketched-in lower orders in an Ealing comedy.  As a result, the real, bloody violence of Frears’ climax is startling chiefly because it’s incongruous.

    Yet I prefer My Beautiful Laundrette to Mean Streets and its combination – sometimes an awkward mismatch – of elements contributes strongly to its engaging quality.  Kureishi’s most satisfying characters are Nasser and Hussein, and the senior actors playing them give the film’s most satisfying performances.  It’s worth waiting for the one scene in which Roshan Seth’s Hussein, with his melancholy wit and beautiful spoken English, and Saeed Jaffrey’s rackety, dynamic, barbarian Nasser have the screen to themselves.  The major younger characters are a trickier matter.  The casting of these roles is fascinating in long retrospect because of the gulf, in terms of what they went on to achieve, between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke.  The latter, nice-looking in a soft-featured way, seems physically right for Omar but you know from an early stage that you’re watching an actor more willing than able.  His woodenness, though, serves to reinforce his character’s charming naïveté, so that it’s hard to say that he gives a less effective performance than Day-Lewis, even though Warnecke’s playing is incomparably less skilful.

    Day-Lewis stands out here but not always in the right way.  As in other pre-My Left Foot (1989) appearances of his (A Room with a View (1986), for example), you sense the presence of an extraordinary actor without being convinced that his characterisation is working.  As Johnny, Day-Lewis does amazing things – especially physically, including an unexpected, effortless vault over a washing machine.  His Cockney accent is less consistent:  it sometimes sounds just right, sometimes less than fully absorbed.  And Day-Lewis’s Johnny doesn’t look as if he could ever have been part of the National Front contingent.  Given the film’s place in British cinema history, though, it’s just as well that you come out of it more impressed by the non-Caucasians in the story.  Another interesting aspect of My Beautiful Laundrette’s timing is that it followed hot on the heels of high-profile last-days-of-the-Raj dramas, on the big screen and the small.  Some of Frears’ main Asian actors were instantly recognisable.  Saeed Jaffrey had appeared in all three of Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Roshan Seth in the first two, Derrick Branche in the third.  It’s fascinating to see this trio situated in such a different time and place.

    12 August 2025

     

Posts navigation