Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim is directed by John Boulting and adapted from the Kingsley Amis novel of the same name. It stars Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Hugh Griffith, Sharon Acker and Jean Anderson.

A Redbrick university In Britain's New Elizabethan Age: Here Are Moulded The Intellectual Drakes And Raleighs Of Tomorrow-Fearless, Independent- -

And State Supported!

Enter Carmichael's accident prone Jim Dixon, who in order to keep his job at the University has to do the bidding for Griffith's dull Professor Welch. Worse still, maybe, is having to spend time with his boorish family, especially the Son, pompous show off Bertrand (Thomas). Salvation may come in the form of Bertrand's companion, though, Christine Callaghan (Acker)?

I haven't read the Amis novel this is based on, so can't have frame of reference there. By all accounts it's very different, and staunch Amis supporters are very dismissive of the Boulting movie. The film itself is hardly prime Boullting Brothers, who would produce British classics such as Brighton Rock and I'm All Right Jack, but it has a number of funny scenes whilst also being nicely flecked with satirical flavouring. Carmichael attacks the lead role with gusto and comic affability, while "scary eyebrows" Griffith and Terry-Thomas provide good comedy footings for Carmichael to work from. The ladies are pretty and effective enough, without really doing anything any other British actress of the time couldn't have done, but all told it's a well acted and genial time filler for the undemanding. 6.5/10

Fans of Kingsley Amis's brilliant novel might with justification hate this adaptation, but taken on its own terms, it is an enjoyable slice of 'fifties British comedy. While the novel's bite may have been lost, the movie's troubled production history (a few weeks into the filming, the original director, Ealing's Charles Crichton, was replaced) fails to show on the finished film.

Ian Charmichael is at his best in this movie. The combination of a (realistic) Northern accent, plus a slightly harder edged characterisation, helps distance him from his usual 'silly ass' image. Perhaps he isn't the Dixon of the book, but it is a fair attempt. A first rate cast adds to the fun, in particular a small but perfectly formed cameo by Terry-Thomas steals the movie.

The final chase is, as been noted, the movie's weakest link (it seems to come out of nowhere and does not fit in with the rest of the film) and is it fair from being the best Amiss adaptation (that honour belongs to the wonderful 'Only Two Can Play'). But despite these flaws, it remains a watch able enough movie.

This is an outstanding movie whose meticulously-crafted set pieces frequently had me in stitches. Superbly cast, Ian Carmichael, Hugh Griffiths and Terry-Thomas were in exceptional form, and the luminous beauty of Sharon Acker lights up the film. If you don't find this funny, charming and uplifting, all I can say is that I feel sorry for you!

The pompous, stiff and class-deferential era of the 1950s is marvellously evoked in this movie. Always the sign of a classic, even the minor characters - Mrs Welch, the taxi driver, the waiter and the university porter, for instance - all hold their own and come across as real people. The appalling persona of Bertrand Welch (Terry-Thomas) with his self-obsessed sense of his own importance is excellently drawn. One to see and quite possibly one to keep.

Kingsley Amis's first and best novel drew much satirical thrust from its evocation of the late 1940s, when British idealism about the socialist government elected in the first flush of World War Two victory was petering out. The ex-communist university lecturer Amis's ambiguity about putting The People in charge- later expressed in a vehement rejection of educational egalitarianism- is already implicit in this campus chronicle.

The Boulting Brothers, themselves on the left, worked "Lucky Jim" into the mildly satirical cycle of movies which made them the main successors to Ealing in the 1950s and early 1960s. But by updating it to the present and filling it with their rep company of character actors, they lost the plot.

Written by the newspaper humorist Patrick Campbell, this picturisation skates over the hypocrisy of Professor Welch and his clan as moneyed leftists-- an early depiction of limousine liberalism-- and concentrates on slapstick. Ian Carmichael, whose northern accent comes and goes, is too posh to play a grammar school lad who has blundered into the wrong profession. Terry-Thomas is too old and too T-T ("extra-ordinary fellah!") for Bertrand Welch, the spoilt son-- and why make him a novelist rather than a painter, when visual fun could have been had with his awful daubs to make up for the absence of Amis's authorial voice?

Most of the novel's heft comes from the gap between Jim Dixon's forced toadying and his secret derision, expressed in making faces and fantasising elaborate practical jokes. Little of this can get through in a script which majors on pratfalls and all-too-Britishly endorses Jim as the good guy by having the Welch's dog adopt him. And the provincial campus is too grand for the era of austerity and demobbed students Amis imagined, as though the Boultings secretly hankered to relocate the tale to Oxbridge.

All that said, there are incidental pleasures. Hugh Griffiths is spot-on as "Neddy" Welch, as is his namesake Kenneth as the creepy Evan Johns. Unexpectedly, given the initial compromises, the denouement (which was slapstick in the book too) gets closer to Amis's acrid eloquence, although drunks on screen become tiresome faster than directors realise. Interestingly in view of Amis's later problems with American publishers, the Boultings tone down the novel's misogyny. Margaret Peel is less neurotic, predatory and manipulative in the film. Jim's love object Christine, alas, is a tittering cipher on both page and screen. The British cinema wasn't doing sex in the Fifties unless it was "exposing" tarts in Soho.

I don't think this 1950's Boulting Brothers comedy dramatisation of Kingsley Amis's novel has aged well. It purports to mock upper-class academia of the time through the vessel of Ian Carmichael's title character (cue madrigal singers) as he gently rocks up against his so-called superiors and betters and supposedly knocks them down a peg or two with his freshness, unconventionality and honesty. It's funny how in so doing he comes off himself as a rather eccentric upper-class toff, one who you believe could still end up as one of the stuffy establishment figures he's presumably meant to contrast with.

It doesn't help that Carmichael is much too old in the part. The Angry Young Men were starting to make waves in British theatre and cinema at the time but here all we get a mildly querulous, getting-on-somewhat man blundering and blustering from one unlikely situation to another. The three main comedic set-pieces of Jim (cue madrigal singers) playing in an impromptu musical gathering at his college superior's house, disastrously arranging the floral display of the university procession to be attended by the new college chancellor and lastly his drunkenly irreverent speech on the designated theme of "Merrie England" in front of the assembled pupils and masters all fall flat with the only time I was remotely amused being when in his drunken state he predictably finds himself in the bedroom of his torch-carrying old-maid admirer and proceeds to shoot over the proverbial open goal. Somehow, in all this, he still gets the pretty young girl although the fact that his competition is Terry Thomas in an unsympathetically written-part makes that a foregone conclusion almost from their first meeting.

I see that contemporary critics compared Carmichael's performance as Jim (cue madrigal singers) with that of Jerry Lewis which somehow manages to insult them both. No one else in the cast stood out for me either although they were none of them helped by the dull screenplay and stodgy direction. If this is what passed for rebelliousness in late 50's British cinema, I can only say I'm glad that the so-called kitchen sink dramas with genuinely vibrant young talent like Finney, Harvey, Bates and Courteney were just around the corner.

Oh and those madrigal singers will infuriate you with every chorus!