(2 of 2)
The hero (Ian Carmichael) is the sort of friendly Freddie that P. G. Wodehouse likes to write about. A graduate of Oxford and the army, he takes a job at the missile works run by his uncle (Dennis Price), who suggests he start at the bottom. So the hero goes blithely to work in the dispatch bay, while Director John Boulting goes slyly to work on the spivs he sees at both ends of Britain's social scale—on the unions that leave a worker free to join or starve and don't care if production goes up so long as wages don't go down; on the businessmen who do not hesitate to turn a profit at society's expense and consider their responsibility to their employees discharged by "a bit of soap in the toilets." In time, of course, the hero heroically revolts against the abuses of both capital and labor, winds up with the public behind him—and bars in front.
Sellers' part is wittily written and redoubtably well played. He is the union's shop steward, a shabby individual who somehow manages to look like a fanatical potato. He has an aggressive proletarian pallor, beady eyes and an eagerly struggling mustache. He will make a speech at the drop of an aitch, and shows a genivs for tautology ("the existing agreement that exists") and abecedarianism ("I have no hesitation in delineating it as barefaced provocative of the workers").
Yet Sellers' character is no caricature. Many gifted mimics imagine that what they can imitate they have understood, but Sellers goes farther than that. His shop steward is the little man with the big dream, and he sees that if there is humor, there is also "enormous sadness" in the grubby little doctrine monger's vision of a workers' paradise somewhere beyond the Vistula: "All them cornfields and ballet in the evening."
* Laundered version of " . . . . you. I'm all right, Jack" a piece of British service slang that became a national catch phrase during the recent British election.