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
