Yesterday I watched, for the first time having somehow missed it before, I’m All Right, Jack, a 1959 comedy, one in a series of classic comedies from the Boulting brothers.
Perfectly cast with every role inhabited by a character actor of enormous talent - Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Margaret Rutherford, Peter Sellers - the movie is also one of the few that equally satirizes both the working class and the upper class. The satire is simultaneously broad and understated, a feat that only the British seem capable of pulling off.
Good film, lots of stuff to talk about, but it’s the last few minutes of the movie that drove me to posting.
Ian Carmichael goes on a live television show and opens the bag of loose one-pound notes that he has been given as a bribe. As he scatters them the entire audience mobs the set, rioting to grab the cash. Out of nowhere a pack of actors from another show costumed as Vikings descends on the cash as the scene fades. The show is called “Argument.” What are the odds that the Pythons drew inspiration from what for them was a recent movie?
Carmichael is thought to have sustained a breakdown and is stripped of his job and sent home. His father is a nudist and lives next to a nudist camp filled with nothing but young pretty girls. They try to get Carmichael to play tennis with them but he is too shy. So shy that when they come into his yard he runs away, even though he is naked himself. A dozen obviously nude young women run chasing after him.
Besides the fact that this scene would have been impossible for any American film of the day, even though the girls are just photographed from behind and at a distance, everything about it is weird. Why is Carmichael running? Is it his character, which is the most naive man on earth, or is it some commentary on the upper classes I’m not getting? It’s not because of the association of homosexuality with the upper classes; earlier in the film he had been enthusiastically necking with Liz Frazer, the character actress with the biggest breasts in England.
And the women are obviously supposed to be stunning lookers. They are also overweight and flabby by today’s standards, probably 10 to 20 pounds too heavy to get hired for such a role in any movie today, British or American or European.
When you think that Swinging London and Twiggy and miniskirts were only a few years away, this is a lost world picture that Americans especially should see if only to understand what the British bands would be rebelling against in the early 60s.
