I’m All Right Jack (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 28, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
John BoultingRelease Date(s)
1959 (April 8, 2025)Studio(s)
Charter Film Productions/British Lion Films (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
I must admit the Boulting Brothers’ I’m All Right Jack leaves this reviewer somewhat bemused. While it’s easy to imagine 1959 British audiences laughing in recognition at this satire of British capitalism run amok at all levels, from unscrupulous upper-class businessmen to corrupted Cockney proletariat, I’m not certain it travels as well to modern American or even British audiences. Though it’s got a great cast and has many funny moments, it does have odd and/or dated qualities, such as very middle-aged Ian Carmichael playing a supposedly fresh-faced young Oxford graduate of 23. Despite its classic status as one of the all-time best British comedies, after seeing it now three times through the years, I still don’t like it any better than the first time I saw it.
Technically, the film is a sequel to Privates’ Progress (1956), an army comedy also directed by John Boulting and produced by his brother, Roy. Carmichael, Richard Attenborough, Dennis Price, Terry-Thomas, and Miles Malleson reprise their roles from that film, while other actors return playing different characters. In I’m All Right Jack (no comma), Stanley Windrush (Carmichael), from a wealthy family, seeks employment as a business executive, this despite the fact that he’s a wide-eyed boob with no experience.
Nevertheless, he makes the rounds touring various big companies. In an amusing sequence he’s given a tour of a candy factory, complete with Willy Wonka-like machinery, eventually becoming violently ill from all the free samples. Also, like Willy Wonka, there’s some very funny black humor: one factory worker sneezes all over the sweets, while another blithely files her fingernails over the assembly line.
Eventually, Stanley gets a job as a blue-collar worker at Missiles, Inc., a factory owned by his uncle Bertram (Price), as part of a scheme by the uncle and army comrade Sidney DeVeere Cox (Attenborough) to drive up the price of a new missile contract at Cox’s rival firm. At the factory, militant-but-dumb-as-a-sack-of-bricks communist shop steward Fred Kite (Peter Sellers, in a breakout role) takes a liking to Stanley, inviting him to stay at his house, where Stanley and his busty daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), soon fall in love. At the factory, however, Stanley is duped by Waters (John Le Mesurier), hired to conduct a time and motion study, with Stanley innocently, unwittingly demonstrating how dramatically productivity could be improved with far fewer union workers. Outraged, Kite calls a strike and sends Stanley “to Coventry” (i.e., ostracize him). But reporters covering the strike, learning that Stanley was essentially fired for “working too hard” turns sympathy against Kite and the strikers, while sympathy strikes across the nation threaten the entirety of British industry.
The cast of I’m All Right Jack is almost unmatched. In addition to those mentioned above, also appearing are Margaret Rutherford (as Stanley’s rich dotty aunt), Irene Handl as Mrs. Kite, Marne Maitland as the Middle Eastern missile buyer, and Victor Maddern, Kenneth Griffith, David Lodge, Terry Scott, Sam Kydd, Donal Donnelly and others as factory workers. Even Sheila Sim (Attenborough’s actress wife) and Stringer Davis (Rutherford’s husband) make cameo appearances. It’s hard to completely dislike a film where elderly scene-stealer Miles Malleson, as Stanley’s father, amusingly spends all his screentime lounging in the nude, a wicker basket in his lap.
I’m All Right Jack is so iconoclastic no British institution emerges unscathed in this farce: capitalism and the rich, advertising, television, trade unions, middle management, higher education, communism—everything. Malleson’s nudist and the colony next-door are the subject of racy double-entendres but, clearly, they’re the happiest, most care-free lot. Kite’s workforce is absurdly lazy, playing cards all day and generally working very hard to do very little. Sellers’s memorable characterization is pompous and dictatorial, quoting communist/unionist homilies he doesn’t understand, full of words he can’t even pronounce correctly. Carmichael’s Stanley is a complete nitwit and, oddly, not very sympathetic even when he tries his best but keeps screwing up; the audience doesn’t care whether he ends up with Liz Frazer or not.
The billboards and commercial jingles for the fictitious firms Stanley visits are funny and dead-on in their inanity, and some of the performances are funny: Attenborough’s unethical businessman is a grotesque caricature unlike anything he played (except, of course, in Privates’ Progress); character comedian John Le Mesurier has an amusing, involuntary nervous twitch, and Margaret Rutherford is droll just entering a room. Terry-Thomas, so hilarious opposite Carmichael in the superior School for Scoundrels, also 1960, is curiously subdued here.
Besides the racy naked female buttocks (always seen in long shot), I’m All Right Jack was something of a groundbreaker with its double-entendre humor, sort of prefiguring the Carry On film series, which itself debuted with an army comedy, Carry On Sergeant, the year before, while its follow-up, Carry On Nurse, was the top-grossing British film of 1959, just ahead of I’m All Right Jack. The Carry Ons didn’t get this smutty for another year or two.
Kino’s new Blu-ray, licensed from StudioCanal, presents the black-and-white film in its original 1.66:1 widescreen format. The transfer is a bit curious; straight cuts look great but all opticals (dissolves, optical matte shots) are in notably poor shape and even blurry, so scene transitions especially are sometimes rather jarring, especially on big home theater screens. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is fine, though, with optional English subtitles provided on this Region “A” encoded disc.
Extras consist of an audio commentary with British film comedy historians Gemma and Robert Ross, who know their stuff, a trailer, and an archival interview with actress Liz Frazer, who died in 2018.
In some ways I’m All Right Jack is the ultimate British farce, at least of the early postwar period, like The Loved One, of its particular time and place, with something to offend everyone. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV