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unions, showed up on the set to watch the filming of one of Peter’s earliest scenes. They recognized Fred Kite’s type immediately and, according to Roy Boulting, reacted all too well during a red-light-flashing, camera-rolling take: “They burst into laughter, which they couldn’t contain. I saw the change in Peter’s face. He hadn’t thought it was funny himself, but now he knew. It was funny.” Thanks to Peter’s skill, Fred Kite was also poignant. As the critic Raymond Durgnat has noted, “There is something sadly sympathetic about his pig-headed notions.” Maxine Ventham, who chairs the lively Peter Sellers Appreciation Society (Spike Milligan, patron; David Lodge, president; HRH the Prince of Wales, honorary member) notes that this “sadly sympathetic” effect derives mainly from Peter’s sensitive, vulnerable eyes: “Fred Kite is betrayed by them,” Ventham rightly declares.

Spike Milligan, of course, took a contrarian view of the film’s politics: “He was heavily pressurized by the Boultings, through the writing, to become this character, because the Boultings were violently against trade unions. And they used this as the spearhead of their attack: Peter Sellers representing something that they hated. He ended up making a very great film for them.”

The sarcastic title I’m All Right, Jack refers to the Boultings’ original satirical target, the money-grubbing, every-class-for-itself attitude the filmmakers ascribe to all of England in the 1950s. (As David Tomlinson’s Lieutenant Fairweather explains to the admiral in Up the Creek, “To put it in the Queen’s English, ‘You scratch my back, and we’ll scratch yours, Jack.’ ”) The film begins with a pre-credits sequence. Sir John Kennaway, an old white-haired man, sleeps peacefully in a deserted clubroom. The camera tracks slowly forward. A servant appears and informs Sir John that the Germans have surrendered—that World War II is over at last. Crowds are shouting in triumph outside the window; Sir John barely registers the news. “Look hard,” a bland voice over intones, “for this is the last we shall see of Sir John,” who rises from his club chair and totters out of the room—“a solid block in an edifice of what seems to be an ordered and stable society. There he goes, on his way out.” There is another reason to look hard at Sir John. He’s Peter, all but hidden under bleached hair and a prosthetic nose.

After a rock-and-roll credits sequence featuring the title song, we meet the protagonist of I’m All Right, Jack—Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), Sir John’s well-named symbolic heir, a man whose class would have entitled him to the same clubby, do-nothing life had a catastrophic world war not provided the working class with some political muscle. Stanley’s father has blithely withdrawn to a nudist camp. Stanley, though, feels the need to earn a living. Too bad he’s incompetent at everything but reading the Times. Interviews and training programs at a variety of industries (soap, candy, corsets) having failed miserably, Stanley lands at Missiles, Ltd. It’s a setup: Stanley’s aristocratic Uncle Bertie (Dennis Price), in collusion with the equally corrupt but bourgeois-born Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough), knowingly sends the idiotic Stanley into Bertie’s munitions factory in order to muck everything up. The reason: so that Missiles, Ltd., won’t be able to fulfill its new Arab-contracted munitions order, thereby forcing the contract to go—at a higher price, naturally—to Cox’s own company, of which Bertie, of course, is a hidden partner.

With his sparkling smile and utter ineptitude, Stanley is perfect for the job. He instantly arouses the workers’ suspicions, and they call in Fred Kite, the shop steward. Kite marches into the office of Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), the personnel manager, and in a complicated, dead-on accent Peter hadn’t employed before—a Cockney base overlaid with semieducated pretension and its carry-along insecurity—Kite demands that Stanley be sacked: “In permi’in’ him to drive one of them trucks, I would say the management is willfully je-ro-podizing the