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Innocent and ill-fitted for the struggles of life, Stanley Windrush aspires vaguely to a career in industry. After some preliminary fiascos, he is given a job by his uncle, Bertram TracepurceI, head of an arms factory. Bertram has a contract with an Arab buyer, and is planning a strike as an excuse to pass the order on to his shady partner, Cox, at an increased cost to be split three ways with the buyer's agent. With the unsuspecting help of personnel manager Hitchcock, Bertram puts his plan into action. Stanley, ignorant of the facts of industrial life, finds himself up against the unions, led by shop steward Fred Kite, an expert agitator, and finally precipitates a crisis by demonstrating his potential working speed to an undercover time-and-motion observer hired by his uncle. The plot, at first successful gets out of hand when Cox's' factory employees come out in sympathy with Stanley's co-workers, and when the press turn Stanley into a national hero. Asked to appear on a TV discussion panel with Kite and the three conspirators, Stanley reveals how he was duped, and shows the audience the case full of notes with which Cox had that very evening tried to bribe him. As usual, however, Stanley finds himself the scapegoat; he decides to seek refuge with his father in the untroubled world of a nudist colony.

The Boulting Brothers have long been developing their popular line of ambivalent satire, latching on to the fashionable mood in films about innocents at large in a world of organised chaos. With I'm All Right, Jack the cycle reaches its over-confident, irresponsible climax, extracting feverishly bright humour from strikes and trade unions, TV discussion panels and nudist films, advertising and the press, personnel management and class hostility, many of them targets still worth the hitting, all of them given ominously equal weight. It seems, from the outset, to be the treatment of this swiftly paced material that is so lamentable; the writing is facetious, the acting often self-conscious, and the direction, over-emphasising reactions, playing every vulgar joke and stutterer's hinted obscenity for ten times its worth, is so laborious as to be totally without spontaneity or wit. Eventually, however, one traces the fundamental wrongness of the entertainment to its tone. It manages, indeed, to offend every level of society. The workshy, gormless employees are ridiculed from a superior, bourgeois point of view; and, to balance the ugliness of the caricature, the employers are shown as double-dealing, the sub-aristocracy (Margaret Rutherford) is impregnably smug and reactionary. Successful comedy is based on love of life, successful satire on indignation: the Boultings succeed in revealing neither, and their equivocal air of detachment can only produce the impression of a supercilious disinclination to come out into the open. This, in turn, presupposes an audience reaction of broad cynicism and facile denigration equal to the Boultings' own.

In such depressing circumstances, one might hardly expect to be amused by Peter Sellers' coldly ironic and calculated performance as the shop steward; yet his technique proves irresistible, and one cannot help but warm to the wistfulness behind Kite's blank and implacable visionary's gaze. By the same token, Dennis Price brings a kind of likable integrity to the villainy of Uncle Bertram; and Irene Handle is as always an unfailing source of joy as the shop steward's striking (in the industrial sense) housewife.

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