It combines social satire with knockabout farce, not always successfully, but at least both are there and both are done crisply and with wit.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2019

Successful comedy is based on love of life, successful satire on indignation: the Boultings succeed in revealing neither.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2018

An intermediary work, one foot in Ealing gentility, the other in the abrasion of Anderson, Reisz, et al.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2010

It's a mostly forgotten work today, despite its all right construction and the funny performance by a restrained Sellers.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 23, 2009

...the Boulting brothers' acerbic satire I'm All Right Jack (1959) is a merciless and hilarious dagger thrown at both Labor and Management, two opposing factions each rotten with exclusive self-interest.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2006

Splendid Boulting Brothers satire with a great Peter Sellers performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 27, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2003

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“The best of the Boultings’ warm, vulgar, affectionate satires... the film blazes into life with the arrival of Sellers’ Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his class enemies.” timeout.com As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1950s, director John Boulting and his producer brother Roy wrung comedy from changing times in a series of films poking fun at various institutions. Their targets included the army in Private’s Progress (1956) and higher education in Lucky Jim (1957), but the most successful was this witty study of industrial relations. Ian Carmichael stars as a doltish aristocrat caught between his crooked factory-owning uncle (Dennis Price) and Peter Sellers’ Soviet-worshipping shop steward. The Boultings gleefully highlight idiocies on both sides. Their neutrality has been criticised as evasive, but it certainly gives scope for the splendid British character actors at their disposal – not least comic icon Terry Thomas as a silver-tongued personnel manager. Although it’s nominally based on a short story by Alan Hackney, the film reunites many of the cast and characters from the Boultings’ 1956 army comedy Private’s Progress.

Stanley Windrush (Carmichael), despite being related to management - his uncle is the slippery Bertram Tracepurcel (Price) - returns from the war to take a job on the factory floor of an arms manufacturing plant. It's all part of Tracepurcel's plan to stir up trouble with the unions, though.

Original Title:

I&

8217;m All Right, Jack

The Boulting brothers' satire on industrial relations hasn't dated that well politically, since it alternates between slap-on-the-wrist jokes about management, and vicious jokes at the expense of trade unions.

Ian Carmichael, reprising his role from Private's Progress, is weedily decent as the toff who takes to the shop floor to see how the other half lives, but the lasting fame of the film is down to Peter Sellers' Fred Kite, a bolshy, work-shy shop steward, intent on shouting 'all out, brothers' at the slightest provocation. An array of British comic talent includes Margaret Rutherford, Dennis Price, Terry Thomas and Liz Fraser.

By today's standards the approach to class politics seems as bizarre as casual racism, but also serves as a time caspule.

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What does the phrase I'm alright Jack mean?

"I'm alright, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their behalf. It carries a negative connotation, and is rarely used to describe the person saying it.