Lucky Jim **** (1957, Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Hugh Griffith, Kenneth Griffith, Maureen Connell, Sharon Acker, John Welsh) – Classic Movie Review 1845

Director John Boulting and producer Roy Boulting’s 1957 movie Lucky Jim is a Fifties British comedy classic, based on the famed novel by Kingsley Amis – one of his very best. Ian Carmichael enjoys a career highspot as Jim Dixon, a hapless new history lecturer at an English redbrick university who finds himself clashing with his boss, the tedious, absent-minded head of the history department, Professor Welch (Hugh Griffith), whom he needs to keep in with to keep his job.

Foolishly he gets involved with a friend of the Professor’s, the neurotic Margaret Peel (Maureen Connell). But then there’s worse trouble when he falls in love with his boss’s future daughter-in-law, Christine Callaghan (Sharon Acker), Jim’s kind of dream girl.  

Beloved eccentric comedian Terry-Thomas (1911-90).

The Boulting Bothers’ version of Amis’s story about Dixon’s misadventures is rather over-broadly comic and the book’s social satire has more or less vanished. However, the laughs are to be found in plentiful abundance, partly thanks partly to all the joyful slapstick jokes in Jeffrey Dell and Patrick Campbell’s screenplay.

But most of the pleasure comes from the large helping of splendid comedy performances from a vintage ensemble led by Carmichael (despite miscasting as the anti-hero of the title), Hugh Griffith as the senior professor Welch, Terry-Thomas as his loud-mouthed son Bertrand Welch, Kenneth Griffith as Cyril Johns and John Welsh as the Principal.

Maybe it’s all surface amusement and easy laughs, simply too low on black humour, sharp edges, anger, characterisation and background detail. But age has given Lucky Jim a veneer of super seedy Fifties charm. And now all of this delightful show seems great fun; and some of it is just hilarious. Great though Carmichael and the two Griffithes are, Terry-Thomas manages to steal the show as the dastardly Bertrand.

Jack Rosenthal adapted the novel again as a British TV series in 2002 starring Stephen Tomkinson and Robert Hardy.

Maureen Connell was married to John Guillermin, the director of The Towering Inferno, King Kong and Death on the Nile. She also starred in The Abominable Snowman the same year (1957).

Only Two Can Play is another Kingsley Amis adaptation of the era, based on his novel That Uncertain Feeling. Director Sidney Gilliat’s 1962 British comedy classic Only Two Can Play stars Peter Sellers, who is on his finest comic form as the bored, henpecked, lecherous librarian John Lewis. Kenneth Griffith is again in the cast.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1845

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Larger-than-life character actor Hugh Griffith (1912-80).