i’m alright jack (w&d. john boulting, w. alan hackney, frank harvey)

This film screened as part of a Sellers season in Cinemateca. It’s the only one I caught. The context is given perhaps because it seems such a curious film to watch on the big screen in Montevideo. The audience laughed along with Sellers. There was one particularly loquacious fellow who reacted effusively all the way through. Watching it now is a bittersweet experience. It should be remembered that this seemingly gentle satire came out at the same time as the Angry Young Men were doing their thing, and Kitchen Sink drama was on the rise. The cosy caricatures of I’m Alright Jack were already being eroded. Curious, too, that these stereotypes include the Trade Union leader, holding industry to ransom with strikes and pickets. This was a story which would continue for decades. In my youth, the Trade Union leaders were household names (Len Murray, Scargill, Hugh Scanlon) and seemed to wield a power which has faded, just as perhaps British industry has faded. The irony that Boulting presents in his movie is that despite their class differences, all the characters fall under the umbrella of a cosy British familiarity. The capacity to bond over a cup of tea or a drink is always there. (Irene Handl really steals the show here.) There is an idea of a unified Britain that will bind us all together, no matter what. And, given the film was made little more than a decade after the end of the second  world war, that’s perhaps not so surprising. Whether the same could be said of Britain today seems doubtful. As an Englishman I would not want to share common ground with the more bigoted sectors of society who the new right seeks to recruit and promote. But it might be that the Boulting view of Britain was always rosy-hued. A truer version would be revealed in the filmmaking of Loach and Clarke, the writing of Osbourne, Wesker, Pinter and Shelagh Delaney. Although it might be said that within the work of Loach, there lurks a lingering hankering for the Britain depicted in I’m Alright Jack, one of confident workers forever quarrelling with cunning bosses, with some kind of compromise inevitably reached by the end.