I'm All Right Jack
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Movie Reviews of I'm All Right Jack
Movie Review: It's all "blow you, I'm allright, Jack"!
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow, you couldn't say that in an American film of this era, and there sure wouldn't be any naked women running about! Aside from the refreshing freedom, this is of course a classic fatalistic satire of post-war England, with absolutely priceless slapstick comedy thrown in (the tour of the candy factory stands up there with anything in the genre). It deserves a wider audience, I had only seen a censored version of it once on TV, and it completely cutout the penultimate line above!Movie Review: Hilarious, the best of British, but no extras
Summary: 4 Stars
The strength of so many British films has always been in the depth of character players available to populate the films. Hand a really good script to those players and invariably something memorable evolved. "I'm All Right Jack" is an hilarious satire which manages to skewer the union movement, the aristocracy and the class system, but it's the players who make this such an entertaining and rollicking farce:
- Ian Carmichael as the upper class twit, Stanley Windrush, looking for a career in industry in the post war industrial landscape. His scenes in the candy factory, makers of Num Yum, and the detergent manafacturer, makers of Detto and Frisco, "Detto is aimed at the young housewife", are hysterical.
- Peter Sellers as the shop steward with a recognisable moustache and his dreams of going to Russia to visit the cornfields and attend ballet in the evening.
- Irene Handle as his wife - "Seems to me the only time you ever do any work is when you are on strike" she says to Sellers before she too goes out on strike and returns to Aunt Edie.
- Liz Fraser as their buxom daughter - "Are them you own teeth?" to Stanley as they kiss in a bubble car beside a rubbish dump.
- Terry Thomas as the sleazy manager of the munitions factory where the trouble starts and who is appalled by the contents of the suggestion box, but pockets them for further reference - "Did a bit of time and motion myself last night - red head, rather athletic".
- Margaret Rutherford as Stanley's aristocratic Aunt Dolly, completely condescending to the working classes - "He won't have to join one of those horrible unions? I do so hate violence." she says to Uncle Bertie, Denis Price, the owner of the munitions factory and instigator of the bribery and corruption around which the plot revolves.
These are just a sample of the wonderful characters you will meet and laugh at and with. The DVD includes the original trailer and there is a biographical essay on Sellers but that's it for extras. The DVD print is excellent but a commentary about the players or the film would have been welcome because there must be a great story behind the Boulting Brothers who wrote, produced and directed the film.
Movie Review: Still very funny; Sellers is excellent, but Terry-Thomas is the highlight
Summary: 4 Stars
4.2 stars
Sellers got much acclaim for this, his first film role, and is indeed very fine in it, though not as outright hilarious as in Heavens Above or Strangelove. He's also in less than half the film, and in a supporting role. As good as Sellers is here, for me the best thing in IARJ, apart from the script, is Terry-Thomas.
TT reprises his role of Major Hitchcock from the 1956 film Private's Progress, the predecessor to IARJ in many ways, and from the same Boulting Brothers. Carmichael and Price were also in it, and this film is the continuing story of the three, now in a labor milieu instead of the military. Thomas for me epitomizes a certain aspect of British aristocracy: the glory of the Raj and all that rot, and all those stiff-upper-lip rotters. He always seems to grasp the good and bad in all his characters, and here he does it to a TT (sorray!). As good as Sellers is, his laid-back portrayals of his two characters here are funny and precise but rarely made me laugh out loud. TT on the other hand cracked me up again and again.
But everyone here is good, and the best thing about the film is its refusal to take sides, instead showing both labor and management as bounders, cads, and generally greedy nincompoops. Pretty much dead-on satire, in other words. The ending is also more realistic than expected; the dry cynicism on display here is still beyond the reach of Hollywood today, apparently.
Carmichael holds it all together nicely, and if you like British humor at all then this will be a major treat. But first let's take a break, wot.
Movie Review: This Movie Still Works!
Summary: 3 Stars
Another home run directed by John Boulting. With Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers - and seldom listed (very young) David Attenborough) -- "We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal. That is victimisation" -- ouch! This is a no-holds-barred comedy about (dare I say it?) greed, corruption, sex, unions, working, not working, hardly working, strikes (if you're hardly working to begin with, how do you know there's a strike on?), more corruption...
Watch Carmichael's Windrush go naively (like Alice) down the rabbit hole of industry; watch a very young Peter Sellers (before he started reading his own reviews) in his award winning role of the shop steward. This is light comedy - with a twist of the knife... It still strikes home, because it's all what brought on the "Out Sourcing" of our time. Ouch!!
Movie Review: Dated Comedy About Labor Relations
Summary: 3 Stars
Though I am a huge fan of Peter Sellers and he does a creditable job here as Mr. Kite, the union organizer, this film did not really grab me. It was funny in parts but my feeling is that the satire here is the product of it's time or that this film is veddy British and one would have to be an Anglophile of the first order to appreciate it. That said, I would recommend this film to Peter Sellers fans if they want a broader overview of his entire film career.