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.

Planned as a follow-up to PRIVATE'S PROGRESS (1956), the Boulting Brothers' version of the Kingsley Amis classic substitutes physical comedy for much of the novel's satire. Ian Carmichael plays Jim Dixon as an amiable dolt, well-meaning but hopelessly lost in a faculty world of would-be Oxbridge dons. Professor Welch (Hugh Griffith) comes across as forgetful yet obsessive; his wife (Jean Anderson) as an incorrigible snob; and their son Bertram (Terry-Thomas) as a pretentious layabout. They inhabit a world of the past, dominated by images of 'Merrie England' - an idealized version of history that in Dixon's view never existed. By contrast Dixon tries to inspire his learners by encouraging them to speculate on alternative versions of the past. The film's enduring theme ("Oh, Lucky Jim!") by John Addison offers an ironic counterpoint to many of the protagonists' misadventures; he is clearly NOT lucky in many of the things he does - for example, bringing a bulldog into the Welches' front room to disrupt their evening concert, or creating total anarchy in the middle of a procession dedicated to the new Chancellor's (Clive Morton's) inauguration. Carmichael possesses a certain degree of comic talent as the innocent lost in a world of pseudo-sophisticates, but the Boultings' attempt to turn him into a Keatonesque figure, complete with a repertoire of India-rubber facial expressions, falls rather flat. The film ends happily with Dixon getting the girl (Sharon Acker), but only after a chase-sequence involving a series of unconvincing studio shots that seems out of place in terms of the film as a whole. It's nice to see him get the better of the Welch family, but we don't get the sense that he is in any proud of his grammar school education which (in terms of the novel at least) is particularly important at the time of the film's original release, when redbrick universities were offering greater opportunities to people from all social backgrounds to advance themselves. The Welch family might not like these social upstarts invading their intellectual space but, in terms of British history as a whole, they were the future while the Welches represented the past.

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!

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.

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.