Lucky Jim – 1957 | 95 mins | Comedy, | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Lucky Jim, is a Boulting Brothers comedy based on Kingsley Amis’s immensely popular satirical novel. Their adaptation of Kingsley Amis’ novel drowned out all the subtleties of his persona by opting for broad farce and knockabout comedy. The film is based on the real life teaching of Kingsley Amis at Swansea University.

Ian Carmichael (Jim Dixon) is cast as the eponymous anti-hero, with Terry-Thomas (Bertrand Welch) in attendance, points to the broadly farcical intent. The angry junior university lecturer Jim Dixon is invited to the house of pompous Professor Welch (Hugh Griffith) for the weekend, where he is acutely accident-prone and spends the weekend drinking heavily. Frustrated by the stuffiness of university life, Jim decides to liven things up, he is next involved in the arrangements for an important university ceremony – but once again his involvement sends the occasion into disaster.

Carmichael fitfully adopted a northern accent as Jim Dixon, in order to signal his lower middle-class provincial origins, but remained the nincompoop “silly ass”. Terry-Thomas‘ Bertrand Welch was also too much the conventional suave bounder to embody the barbed particularities of Amis’ portrait of pretentious metropolitan literary bohemia which covers a ruthless competitiveness. However, the film’s box-office success suggests that these changes grated on critics who knew the novel and saw the film as an opportunity missed, rather than on the broad cinema-going public who enjoyed a by-now familiar mixture of buffoonery and the deflation of the pompous.