Heavens Above (1963)

Heavens Above is the high point of the several collaborations between  Peter Sellers and the British film making duo of Roy and John Boulting. The film takes on two most sacred of cows, organised religion and Christian beliefs (particularly how they work in the real world), with a brilliant, straight performance by Sellers, undermined by a ridiculous and unnecessary climax.

Sellers plays John Smallwood, a good hearted but naive prison chaplain, assigned as vicar to a small and prosperous English country town after a clerical error.

Smallwood's brand of Christianity runs on charity and forgiveness, the polar opposite of his congregation, who are outraged when he takes on a black man as his churchwarden, lets a gypsy family live in the vicarage, and talks the local landowner Lady Despard into giving free food for the church to distribute to the locals.

The cinematic legacy of Peter Sellers rests on his comic creations such as Inspector Clouseau and Dr Strangelove, but with Smallwood he gives us a character who is both vulnerable and believable, even resisting the urge to make his Brummie accent comically broad.

The writing, directing and producing team of Roy and John Boulting had worked with Sellers on the industrial relations satire I'm Alright Jack, where they mocked both the power-crazed unions and the greedy boardrooms. Here they take a similar approach, laying into the hypocritical church leaders and their congregation, but also Smallwood's guileless and easily exploited Christianity, and his betrayal by both his bosses and the people he tried to help is heart breaking.

Then, from out of nowhere, the story takes an unexpected diversion, abandoning village life to focus on a frightened astronaut and a new job for Smallwood. The comedy becomes broad and wacky, the polar opposite of everything we've seen up to then.  Jarring and pointless, this switch nearly derails the rest of the film.

Lucky Jim (1957)

Adapted for the screen by the producer director team of (respectively) Roy and John Boulting, and starring Ian Carmichael, Lucky Jim is a minor forgettable piece of 1950s British comedy, and a disappointment considering the talent involved.

The story, based on the Kingsley Amis novel of the same name, follows the misadventures of Jim Dixon, a young history lecturer at a “redbrick” English university. Along the way he manages to unintentionally offend his colleagues and sabotage his career – but always comes out okay in the end, because, after all, he is “Lucky” Jim.

The film is hampered by an indecisiveness of what tone to take with the material, something that spills over into both the script and the casting. At times Dixon is shown as an “angry young man”, shaking up the stuffy world of academia with his unpretentious teaching style, and love of women and booze; at others he simply looks like a hapless boob, blundering around from mishap to mishap.

Ian Carmichael was an excellent comic actor, especially playing affable but clueless upper class types, such as in the far superior I’m Alright Jack (also made with John and Roy Boulting) or as Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC TV series World of Wooster. Here though, he seems uncertain what to do with Dixon, his vague generic northern accent hinting at lower middle-class provincial roots without ever convincing us.

In addition, wasting the talents of Terry Thomas is simply unforgivable. Thomas, like Carmichael, worked best within a limited range, but also had charisma and comic timing in abundance. Here he looks and acts like a sleazy middle-aged weirdo rather than the hip young sophisticated bohemian type his character is supposed to be.

The subject matter is also a problem. There is nothing wrong with satire aimed at a very specific set of people, but the satirists have to accept that it may not stretch to a wider audience. To do that you have to find a way to make the subject relevant to the wider world, and this, ultimately, is what Lucky Jim fails to do. The world of 1950s English academia, at least as presented here, is just too rarefied and obscure to make sense to anyone not familiar with its people and customs.