I'm All Right Jack
Peter Stead looks at how a film that had British audiences chuckling, had a tarter subtext on social and class divisions at the end of the 1950s
The suggestion that John Boulting's comedy of industrial relations is a significant film has buzzed around in the minds and writings of British intellectuals ever since its opening in the summer of 1959. The film was a great popular success, the most commercially successful film from any source released in Britain that year.
The production company, British Lion, had been eager to follow up the comparative success of its 1956 film Private's Progress which had broadly, and rather farcically, satirised the army in what were to be the last days of National Service. I'm All Right Jack, adapted from a work by the same novelist, Alan Hackney, was also produced and directed by the Boulting brothers and very largely starred the same cast. Quite legitimately the company used as its chief advertising slogan the succinct message that 'The Private's Progress Shower Are Back' and this was the theme taken up first by the more popular national papers and later by the provincial press. The talk in the pubs and work places was that this was a very funny comedy that had to be seen, even if it meant missing a few hours of television.
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