I'm All Right Jack (1960)

My union and my employers are currently in dispute and we older members of the workforce were talking about about this film so I thought I would watch it again and bought the remastered DVD which is marketed under the VINTAGE CLASSICS label.Watching it again for the first time in years I am not sure it is such a classic but I do feel the film is misunderstood by most reviewers (not me of course I am a genius!!).No plot spoilers of course but the film depicts union versus management rows in late 1950s Britain.I was born the year after this film was made but I think I get most of the contemporary references due to being a history nut.People go on about Sellars performance in this,and of course his performance is great but he has less screen time than I remembered but the lines he has are great.People reviewing this film often say it is anti union satire,well it is but anti a certain kind of union activist and it is also savage in its attack on employers and the class system in Britain.I like the film but it over the top and there is too much slapstick for my liking.If someone was studying the way unions are shown in British films they might like to watch this film along with FLAME IN THE STREETS and THE ANGRY SILENCE.

British film "I'm all right Jack" is about a young member of British aristocracy who decides to have a direct, personal experience of what it means to be a commoner. It is not as easy as he had envisaged it to be. Although he is able to achieve near success, what is more important is to learn that he is able to experience how both management teams and trade unions manage to have their own personal agenda in dealing with workers. Post war years in UK are the setting of this John Boulton film, it was a time when one could hear about Russia as the only foreign nation for Britishers due to its economic system and political ideology. From the perspective of style, this film is divided into two major genres : comedy and drama. Its first quarter can be classified as "pure comedy" wherein a young British aristocrat called Windrush turns out to be an absolute failure in getting a common man's job which he had always longed to get. Director John Boulting does enormous justice to film's theme by depicting how factories are in the tight grip of labor unions and management's team. Television was not considered a threat to cinema when this film was made. It is perhaps for this reason television was chosen as the venue where the young aristocrat would reveal the truth.

This is frequently biting, often just funny, but overall it is more sad commentary.I am reminded of an Associated Press photo from about 1987. The Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, had just voted -- again -- to turn down the unionizing effort of the United Auto Workers. Employees were quoted as saying this was a victory for the workers.Writing in the spring of 2009, just a few days after Chrysler has announced its bankruptcy, and after meeting in my current geographical location, time after time, people who had fled Detroit carrying horror stories of union corruption and, face it, complicity by industry and management, I wonder if we will ever have civilization and a sound economy again."I'm All Right Jack" manages to paint a sadly accurate picture of a culture perfectly spelled out by the Stanley character when he throws the Marxian motto of "From each ..." into the face of the Kite character, the union steward -- beautifully played, by the way, by the brilliant Peter Sellers.What isn't spelled out, but ought to be obvious to any thinking viewer, is that the evils of the situation portrayed in "I'm All Right Jack" don't come from corrupt management or corrupt unions alone but from an acceptance of and institutionalization of the principle of coercion.Let me stress that one can watch "I'm All Right Jack" with your thinking process turned off and you can just enjoy the superlative acting and the funny situations, but I urge you to think, to understand there really is an important point being made, even if not one the makers themselves necessarily intended.

If it hadn't been for the fact that a similar (though less cynical) film had been made just a few years earlier (THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT), I might have scored this parody a bit higher. Despite obviously being a comedy, the film is an amazingly insightful attack on the floundering state of British labor following the Second World War. While Britain used to be the most productive country on the planet, during this era they were torn apart by strikes and work slowdowns. Yet the film doesn't just attack labor unions with their unreasonable demands and poor work ethic. It also attacks factory owners who actually exploit this to their own interests. This film is obviously a loud declaration that the British Empire is in fact dead.The film begins with an upper class twit named 'Windrush' going to work for the first time. However, he really isn't cut out for management despite his Oxford education--and he seems better suited to manual labor. The problem is that after failing again and again in management, he is simply too good as a blue collar worker. This is because he works way too hard and makes all his extremely lazy co-workers look bad! And, when management documents how much work one motivated man CAN do, this ultimately results in a strike, as management wants the workers output to increase--or at least that's what they claimed. All this set in motion by a slow-witted but very decent upper class gent working as a forklift driver!! The film is very well written and clever. While younger audience members might not appreciate the film's insights, it is funny in a droll sort of way. Additionally, having wonderful actors such as Peter Sellers and Terry-Thomas sure didn't hurt! Overall, sharp social and political satire that does a great job of attacking labor and management and giving insights into the decline of the British economy.