Lucky Jim

Jim Dixon works in that most protected of places – a redbrick university! However his natural laziness and clumsiness sees him forced to keep in the favour of the dull and absentminded Professor Welch in order to protect his job. With his natural affinity for bad luck, Jim struggles to find a quiet life and a unwanted romance with Margaret (the professor's friend) just make things more difficult. Things get worse when he is put in charge of organising things for the new chancellor but Welch's son arrives in the company of a beautiful young woman, Christine, who Jim finds very attractive but totally unattainable.

With people like the Boutling brothers, Carmichael and Thomas involved I was definitely going to watch this film when they showed it last week as part of the normal cycle of black & white films on daytime TV afternoons, however I must admit not to be entirely won over by this. I have not read the book on which this is based, but I am told that it is a great deal sharper than this film, not a surprise since the film surprised me by having absolutely no satirical edge to it whatsoever and instead seemed to be aiming to be a vague farce. The plot has no sharp edges to it and it only has a very basic sense of humour that involves more pratfalls than witty dialogue and, as a result, I found little here that I actually cared enough about to get into the film. The laughs weren't forthcoming, the plot was rather shallow and uninteresting and the characters were thin.

With all these problems it is no real surprise that even the talent in this cast struggle to make anything of it. Carmichael plays it all too foppish and clumsy and he never really gets a character out of the film. Even Terry Thomas seems unsure of what he is supposed to be doing with this stuff and he doesn't make any memorable impact. Acker is very pretty and Griffith is suitable cast but generally the cast are let down by the material.

Overall this is an average film that doesn't compare to the many better films that the main cast members, producer and director have all done. Usually I would say that any film with these people involved would be worth seeing but unfortunately I can say it about this outing.

Kingsley Amis might not had liked the adaptation of his novel set in a redbrick university in 1950s Britain when university education started to expand and took on some working class students. The Boulting brothers film comes across a little too much of an Ealing comedy for my liking with slapstick and loses the novel's edge.

Ian Carmichael is the northern grammar school boy made good but looking for a permanent teaching job at the university. To do this he has to toady to Professor Welch and his family and every task he is entrusted to do ends in disaster sometimes due to Jim's shortcomings.

As a lecturer Jim is passionate with a leftist slant on history in contrast with Professor Welch dull and old fashioned musings which we see when Jim has to deliver Welch's lecture.

In between we have Jim getting into escapades with Terry Thomas and his Canadian girlfriend and a slapstick scene involving a parade with flowers on the quadrant of the university.

However whilst Carmichael is spirited as Jim he looks too old, even worse Terry Thomas looks too old as the son of the Professor Welch.

The film is episodic and although starts promisingly enough it tries too hard to be an Ealing style comedy rather than a satirical adaptation. The redbrick university never convinces maybe I have seen too many of these places that were built in the 1960s.

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.

Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer at an unnamed provincial university. Kingsley Amis, who wrote the novel on which this film is based, took his title from a song- "Oh, lucky Jim, How I envy him..." (We hear this song a couple of times during the film). As the story opens, however, Jim does not seem to be particularly lucky or enviable. Indeed, his life can be summed up in the words of the theme-song from "Friends":-

"Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D. O. A."

He hates his job and his boss, Professor Welch. He is perpetually short of cash and forced to live in a seedy lodging-house. His relationship with his possessive, needy girlfriend Margaret appears to be going nowhere and, while he has set his cap at an attractive blonde named Christine, that relationship also appears to be doomed as she is the girlfriend of Welch's novelist son Bertrand.

The novel has long been a favourite of mine, but I have never had the same affection for the film version, largely because the film-makers never manage to find an equivalent for Amis's bitingly satirical authorial voice. Scenes which are brilliantly funny in the book, such as Professor Welch's disastrous musical weekend, in the course of which Jim manages to set fire to his bed, or the one in which Jim delivers a lecture while drunk, never come to life in the same way on the screen. The scriptwriters also include some episodes of slapstick humour not found in the book, such as Jim's attempt to organise the floral decorations at an academic ceremony or the chase scene at the end, but these are no substitute for Amis's savage wit.

Ian Carmichael was later to gain a reputation for playing upper-class characters such as Bertie Wooster or the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, but in 1957 these productions still lay in the future. Even so he still seems a bit too posh for Jim, who is supposed to be a working-class Northerner, as well as a bit too old at 37. This means that the question of social class, an important theme in the novel, is rather avoided in the film. Contrary to what one reviewer writes, Amis, who in 1954 still considered himself to be on the Left, was not using "Lucky Jim" to satirise well-heeled bourgeois Leftists. (Later, when he had moved sharply to the Right, he was to lay into radical-chic champagne socialists with gusto in novels like "Girl, 20" from 1971). Professor Welch, with his romantic fantasies of some pre-modern pre-industrial "Merrie England", is a nostalgia-obsessed cultural conservative, and Bertrand probably a political one.

The Jim of the novel is in many ways a flawed character. For one who hopes to make a living by teaching history, he displays a surprising lack of enthusiasm for his subject. He drinks too much, often treats Margaret badly and can be rude and tactless. He devotes a lot of energy to pursuing feuds against those who annoy him and can be oddly childish. The character in the film is very much watered down in an attempt to make him more likeable; this attempt succeeds to some extent, but at the cost of also making him less interesting.

Maureen Connell's Margaret is less neurotic, hysterical and manipulative here than she is in the book, and as a result becomes completely forgettable. Sharon Acker's Christine is almost equally so. (Christine was English in the book but here becomes Canadian, possibly in order to make the film more marketable in North America). Those characters in the film who do stand out tend to be those who are played in the same way as they are in the novel, notably Hugh Griffith's absent-minded, evasive, pedantic and pretentious Professor Welch and Terry-Thomas's pompous, self-important, snobbish and bullying Bertrand. (Like Carmichael, however, Terry-Thomas at 46 was really too old. He was actually a year older than Griffith who plays his father).

The film is not altogether a bad one and can provide a few amusing moments. When one considers how good its source novel is, however, it really should have been a lot better. 6/10.

It's hard for me to be objective about this film, as it is adapted from my favorite novel--which I've read eight or nine times. Also, I waited so long to see it that it may have been inevitable that I would ultimately be disappointed. Ironically, I first heard about the film some years before I read the book, and it was only after I read the book that I made the connection between it and the description my brother had once given me. It would be about 20 years (no kidding!) before I finally saw the film myself. I've now seen it twice and mostly hated it both times.

Kingsley Amis's LUCKY JIM was obligatory reading among history students when I was in grad school 30 years ago. The story about an unhappy history instructor in a crummy British provincial university expressed a lot of the angst that we felt as grad students, and it was funnier than heck as well. I loved the book then, and still love all these years later. Why, then, was the film such a disappointment? Mainly because the script muted much of the savageness of Amis's humor, and because it tacked on an idiotic chase scene at the end that has nothing whatever to do with the original story--or even with what goes before it in the film. (Even Ian Carmichael--who played Jim--hated that ending. He told me that the people making the film didn't seem to have any idea of what they were doing--and it shows.)

The producers also added a very unsatisfactory and irrelevant academic procession in them middle of the film--evidently for the sole purpose of making Carmichael look like a klutz by having him tripping over flowerpots and dropping things in the middle of the solemn affair.

Nevertheless, the film does have its virtues, chief among them is excellent casting. Ian Carmichael was born to play Jim. Terry-Thomas was properly unctuous as Bertrand; Hugh Griffith certainly looked the part as Professor Neddy; Maureen Connell looked like I imagined the neurotic Margaret Peel; and Sharon Acker made a fine-looking Christine Callaghan.