Plot
After leaving the army and returning to university, newly-graduated upper class Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) is looking for a job but fails miserably at interviews for various entry-level management positions. Stanley's uncle, Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) and his old army comrade, Sidney DeVere Cox (Richard Attenborough), persuade him to take an unskilled blue-collar job at Uncle Bertram's missile factory, despite Aunt Dolly's (Margaret Rutherford) misgivings.
At first suspicious of the overeager newcomer, Communist shop steward Fred Kite (Peter Sellers) takes Stanley under his wing and even offers to take him in as a lodger. When Kite's curvaceous daughter Cynthia (Liz Fraser) drops by, Stanley readily accepts.
Meanwhile, personnel manager Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas) is assigned a time and motion study expert, Waters (John Le Mesurier), to measure how efficient the employees are. The workers refuse to cooperate but Waters tricks Windrush into showing him how much more quickly he can do his job, than other more experienced employees. When Kite is informed of the results, he calls a strike to protect the rates his union workers are being paid.
This is what Cox and Tracepurcel want; Cox owns a company that can take over a large new contract with a Middle Eastern country at an inflated cost. He, Tracepurcel and Mr. Mohammed (Marne Maitland), the country's representative, would each pocket a third of the £100,000 difference.
Things don't quite work out for either side. Cox arrives at his factory to find that his workers are walking out in sympathy for Kite and his strikers. The press reports that Kite is punishing Windrush for working hard. When Windrush decides to cross the picket line and go back to work (and reveals his connection with the company's owner), Kite asks him to leave his house. This provokes the adoring Cynthia and her mother (Irene Handl) to go on strike. More strikes spring up, bringing the country to a standstill.
Faced with these new developments, Tracepurcel has no choice but to send Hitchcock to negotiate with Kite. They reach an agreement but Windrush has made both sides look bad and has to go. Cox tries to bribe him with a bagful of money to resign quietly but Windrush turns him down. On a televised discussion programme moderated by Malcolm Muggeridge (playing himself), Windrush reveals to the nation the underhanded motivations of all concerned. When he throws Cox's bribe money into the air, the studio audience riots. In the end, Windrush is convicted of causing a disturbance and everyone else is exonerated. He is last seen with his father (Miles Malleson) relaxing at a nudist colony, only to have to flee from the female residents' attentions.
Read more about this topic: I'm All Right Jack
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)