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Absolutely the worst movie.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Here's a terrific, still very British topical comedy on the subject of industrial relations between the management and the burgeoning trade union movement of the time. The catalyst for the action is posh young aristocrat Stanley Windrush, played by Iain Carmichael, who can't settle into the normal "captain of industry" jobs lined up for him by his well connected family. In the end he settles for a shop-floor job at his uncle's missiles factory, little suspecting the part he will play in proceedings which will eventually lead him to inadvertently trigger a national strike paralysing the country's manufacturing industry and even seeing himself invited onto a national "Question Time" type TV programme cast as the ordinary average decent bloke just trying to keep his head down and get his work done.The satire is razor sharp and the better for not taking sides. On the one hand we have Windrush's uncle and his dubious fat cat friend, spivvily played by Richard Attenborough with a ridiculous con-man moustache to boot, orchestrating matters, or so they think, relying on bolshie shop steward Peter Sellers and his apparently bone idle, one-speed workforce to come out on strike to facilitate their plan to skim a fortune in transfer contract fees while the workforce itself comes across as heart lazy, self-interested and completely hung up on their own arcane, counter-productive trade union rules.With an all-star British cast of familiar faces on show like Sellers, Carmichael, Attenborough plus Terry Thomas, Liz Fraser, John Le Mesurier and Irene Handl this potent material is in good hands and the comedy flows thick and fast before arriving at its most odd conclusion, reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's "A Handful Of Dust" in its surreal abstraction with a disillusioned Windrush reluctantly joining in of all things a naturist camp. I watched in near disbelief the sight of retreating naked female behinds over the end titles!Elsewhere the comedy is less broad but still very much to the point as management and union play out their cat and mouse games in complicit disharmony. I loved the topicality of the times too, such as when Windrush's new "fan club" of young girls screams for him, his name Stan emblazoned over last month's hero Elvis.One suspects that events are only slightly exaggerated from real-life which only helps the comedy resonate all the more. This film is better than all right Jack, in my view.

This is a breathtakingly bold and audacious satirical film which was frankly unprecedented for British cinema in the 1950s. Peter Sellers stars in a serious role, played half-straight and half-caricatured, as a labour union shop steward and 'Chairman of the Works Committee' at a factory of an arms firm called Missiles Limited. The film was written and directed by John Boulting and produced by his brother Roy Boulting. The well-know comedian of the time, Terry-Thomas, plays a scheming capitalist fraudster. Ian Carmichael excels as an upper middle class twit of unparalleled naivety and idiocy who gets a job as an ordinary worker and discovers that he loves it, leading to all sorts of class complications. He had been directed by John Boulting three years earlier in PRIVATE'S PROGRESS (1956, see my review), where he was even more brilliant. One of the best and most hilarious performances is by Irene Handl, that marvellous cockney character actress who tells everybody where to get off in no uncertain terms, and in this instance, her husband Peter Sellers (an earlier incarnation of Jeremy Corbyn). The cast also includes Dennis Price, Margaret Rutherford, Victor Maddern, the deliciously droll and hilarious glamour gal Liz Fraser, John Le Mesurier, Kenneth Griffith, and Raymond Huntley. In other words, just about everybody who was anybody in British film comedy at the time is in the film, the only actor seeming slightly ill at ease being Attenborough, who was never good at being funny. The Boulting Brothers certainly pulled this off, and the film is a famous classic. Their portrayal of corporate corruption was done with first-hand knowledge, as they were expert at ripping off their own company themselves, as I know from personal experience, when I refused to cooperate with them in a fraudulent transaction, so I do know what I am talking about. They were brilliantly talented but they were corrupt when it came to money and were quite brazen about it. So this film rips the lid off the most amazing collection of national hypocrisies, and we nearly die laughing and gasping with delight at the film's ingenuity and breath-taking boldness.

Ah, progress. Never mind that tosh. "I'm All Right Jack" is a hilarious send up of the 20th century very much on point today, an anything-goes capitalist-meets-socialist system where workers and owners are equally victimized.Peter Sellers won the British Academy Award for Best British Actor for his performance as union leader Fred Kite, beating out a field that year which included Laurence Olivier, Laurence Harvey, Richard Burton, and Peter Finch. Ian Carmichael is the actual lead actor in "I'm All Right Jack", and Kite doesn't even show up until after the first 20 minutes, but Sellers makes Kite a compelling and comedic character worth remembering as a symbol of organized labor run amuk.A kind of sequel to "Private's Progress", also featuring Carmichael in the role of Stanley Windrush, "I'm All Right Jack" is a swinging social satire. Two factory owners (played by Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough) conspire to create a labor strike at a munitions factory to get a higher price. To do that, they need someone to create a bit of friction. Enter Windrush, a total innocent upper-class twit who only cares about earning his pay, no matter how much that offends Kite and other labor leaders."We're living in the welfare state," says the middle manager Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas). "I call it the farewell state.""I'm All Right Jack" starts out very cheeky indeed, with a surprising eyeful of female nudity circa 1959 and cracks at religion and the military. Later, a stuttering character sees an array of photographers and asks: "Why don't you tell them to f-f-f-photograph something worthwhile."The only major problem with "I'm All Right Jack" is the slowness of the film right up until Windrush arrives at Missiles Ltd., after which the comedy becomes a kind of classless class comedy, where shrapnel flies thick and fast and no one is immune. Sellers' performance is brilliant, giving you a character who's likable even as he plays the antagonist. You can scorn his love of Stalinist Russia, which he boils down to cornfields and ballet, but you empathize with his fairness (not wanting to fire Windrush is his undoubted downfall) and his sensitivity for the feelings of Mrs. Kite (Irene Handl) and their daughter (Liz Fraser). He's just a bit extreme."We cannot and do not accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal," Kite argues. "That is victimization."The real bad guys are the bosses guying the system, though John Boulting, who directed and co-wrote this with Alan Hackney and Frank Harvey, wants you to see the union abuses that make such a scam not only possible but desirable to the upper classes.Sellers also appears at the film's outset as "Sir John", a men's-club inhabitant who witnesses the end of World War II as an unpleasant upending of the old social order, before disappearing in the postwar wake. "A solid block in what seemed the edifice of an ordered and stable society," is his postscript.Contrast him with the very hip, 60s-sounding Al Saxon theme song that sticks its post-war, pre-Beatles attitude in your face as smartly as flipping the bird to Churchill (something else we get to see in the first few minutes), and you find yourself watching what had to be for 1959 a very mod film. It still stands up today as one of the best labor-management comedies, even if the British class system it addresses is no more.

I like me some British comedies from all over the spectrum (Kind Hearts and Cornets, Ruling Class, Python stuff, Lady Killers, etc.) but this ungodly, slow-moving plot wrings profoundly meager humor from its social commentary. At a factory the layabout socialist workers are one powerful faction and management is another. Each tries to get the upper hand, as an eager and "horrors!" productive new worker upsets the delicate balance. That's not a bad premise, but the movie is a neverending chain of lost opportunities. In the end it goes all Frank Capra when the new worker finds his conscience during a live TV show.It doesn't exactly move. At the 30 minute mark, the premise is still creakily coming together. After a very long first hour, I still hadn't even grinned once. Not only is Sellers not funny, but the script is humor free. If there are laughs in it, I'd need a team of British paleontologists to help me find them. I found this movie long and trying. 'The Mouse the Roared' is another promising comic concept executed horribly like this. If you had to watch one of the two, this is slightly more competent. A satire without a single laugh.