John and Roy Boulting, born on 21 Dec 1913, first made their name in the 40s, with films such as Thunder Rock (1942) and Fame is the Spur (1947), but their most famous film remains Brighton Rock, made in 1947 and featuring Richard Attenborough in the iconic role of Pinkie.  However, although this remains their best known single film, their name came to be associated with a string of comedies from the mid-1950s onwards, mainly satirical in nature, which looked at institutions such as the army, the law and industrial relations using a pool of unrivalled comic talent wtih the likes of Ian Carmichael, Peter Sellers, Terry-Thomas, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Miles Malleson, Victor Maddern, John Le Mesurier, Kenneth Griffiths, Thorley Walters....the list is almost endless.  As is natural with comedy, the characters were often cariactures, but in many instances not only did the actors portray a type, they often created that type from scratch; when you think of a pompous union official, you need look no further than Peter Sellers' Fred Kite in I'm All Right Jack, if you have in mind a bumbling, accident-prone innocent then Ian Carmichael springs to mind, and Terry-Thomas is, well, just Terry-Thomas.

The pattern was set with the release in February 1956 of Private's Progress, the cautionary tale of  naive and unwordly undergraduate Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), who is called up during the Second World War and thrown into a world he knows little about.  His tutor at university can't even remember his name, his father (Miles Malleson) is, as always, a dithering old duffer, and the eagerness with which his fellow student Egan (Peter Jones) approaches the task in hand is in sharp contrast to his own apprehensiveness, and a promise to keep an eye out for him in the army from his uncle Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) is of litle comfort. 

Army life was very familiar to a great majority of the British public at the time, and was always a subject guaranteed to get plenty of laughs, and Carmichael provides them as he encounters William Hartnell as an army Sgt (a role he was to reprise a year later in the first Carry On film) and goes on to becomes a one-man disaster area, culminating in him single-handedlly destroying an obstacle course.  He manages of course to achieve the unthinkable - fail the officers' course - and there are few better to deliver the verdict with an air of studied disdain than John Le Mesurier. 

Windrush ends up under Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), but although he gets a positive welcome, unfortunately he gets placed with some other recruits who take a rather non-orthodox view of how to get through basic training:

I'm all right Jack takes aim at a number of targets and hits them all; it's described in Halliwell's Film Guide as a "satirical farce which...finds corruption in high, low and middle places".  Unusually for the time, it is a sequel to Private's Progress and features not only the same actors - with one very important addition - but in the same roles, so Carmichael as Stanley Windrush, Attenborough as Cox, Dennis Price as Tracepursel, Terry-Thomas as Major Hitchcock and even Miles Malleson as Stanley's father all return.

Set in the early 1950s, with Windrush looking for a job in industry, the early scenes show him struggling to come to terms with the opportunities offered by companies such as Detto, Num-Yum and the British Corset Company.  However, they want him even less than he wants to go into industry, so it seems only natural when Cox and Tracepurcel re-enter the scene, and offer Stanley a job in the latter's factory - but as a worker.  This is all part of a complicated plan related to foreign contracts, wtih Cox and Tracepurcel looking to make a dishonest bob or two as usual, but the comedy really starts when Windrush starts at the factory, just as Major Hitchcock employs a time-and-motion man, Waters (John Le Mesurier again) to spy on the workers. 

it is hard to write about I'm all right Jack without writing about Sellers; Fred Kite dominates the film, his ludicrous pretensions, pomposity and ridiculous strangulated accent still memorable 60 years later.  Some of his dialogue still reverberates - "We do not, and cannot, accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal, that is victimisation" and "Ah, Russia, all them cornfields and ballet in the evening" - and indeed only the other week I saw the latter quote referred to on Facebook in a quiz.  Kite and his works committee move in on Stanley, sensing that he is yet another time-and-motion man sent in by management, thereby missing the real one, whilst Major Hitchcock is only too relieved to realise that the works committee have not caught Waters out yet. Windrush's natural naivety is made full use of by Waters as he starts his investigation:

The beauty of the narrative is that Stanley, the only character in the film who is not looking after number one - the whole 'I'm all right Jack' ethos 'celebrated' in the film - is the only one at the end who loses out; a very modern, jaundiced view.

The tag line says that Heavens Above! takes off where I'm all right Jack left off, but. I suppose inevitably, it is something of a disappointment. The Brothers made a couple of other films inbetween, including Suspect, which I've not seen, but Heavens Above! was clearly a return to the satire fold, this time looking at organised religion. After his towering performance as Fred Kite, they were presumably relying on Sellers again in the central role of the Reverend John Smallwood, but there is not much room for maneouvere in this rather self-righteous, humourless character. 

As wtih most of the Boulting Brothers' films, we are treated to an introductory montage wtih voice over, this time on the town of Orbiston Parva and its main employer, the Tranquilax factory, but this rather slows things down and the film is already overlong for a comedy, at nearly two hours.  The old standard plot device of a 'clerical error' means that the Rev John Arthur Smallwood (Sellers), a gullible and naive vicar who works in a prison (where the prisoners run rings round him) is given a new parish in Orbiston Parva on the recommendation of the tradtionalist Archdeacon Aspinall (Cecil Parker) instead of the Rev John Smallwood (Ian Carmichael).  He immediately gets the backs up of all the locals, including the great and the good, firstly by criticising the town's population for their faithlessness and secondly by appointing Matthew (Brock Peters, fresh from his role in The L-Shaped Room) as the new church warden over Major Fowler (William Hartnell).

Most of the best scenes throughout the film involve the local gypsies, the extended Smtih family, headed by Eric Sykes, Irene Handl and Miriam Karlin, whom Smallwood takes in at the vicarage (much to the consternaton of the local community), but the film really takes off with one of the Boulting Brothers' favourite devices, what I call the 'spiralling out of control' sequence.  This was first really noticeable in films like Passport to Pimlico, but it is used to very good effect in Private's Progress, for example, and in this scene the Reverend's well-meaning attempt to provide some practical charity has some unintended and unwelcome consequences for the local traders:

After this the Boulting Brothers moved on to other areas, with fresher faces - one such film I've only just seen is Rotten to the Core (1965), with Anton Rodgers and Charlotte Rampling, which I hope to write about soon, but there's also The Family Way wtih the first pairing of Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett before the shock-thriller Twisted Nerve with the same couple, written about on the 'Unsung films' section of this website.  Whilst many of these comedies may be now half-forgotten, Private's Progress and I'm all right Jack still have much to say about society - as well as being very, very funny.