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I’m All Right Jack

Screening on Film
Directed by John Boulting.
With Peter Sellers, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough.
UK, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 104 min.
Print source: HFA

S is for Simply Sellers

The Boulting brothers created a series of satirical portraits of British society, focusing on the National Service in Private’s Progress and provincial university life in Lucky Jim. Their I’m All Right Jack is a farce about a most unlikely subject: trade unions and management in an English arms factory. The conniving head of a missile plant (Price) arranges a sale with an Arab country and then plans a workers’ strike so that the project can be completed at an inflated price at the neighboring factory of a fellow industrialist (Attenborough). When the laborers’ tea breaks are eliminated, the shop steward, played by Sellers with a combination of arrogance and ineptitude, takes the bait and calls a strike, but the conspiracy is upset when the neighboring plant goes on strike out of sympathy. Sellers is sensational in his first major role, and won a BAFTA award for his work.

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