It is both predictable, not to mention often a little asinine when discussing these things, but Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim" novel works more efficiently than its adaptation. I thought it very easy to admire how well Amis got under the skin of his characters in his 1954 book - the quite crippling uncertainty its eponymous lead faced down in being kept on another year in his job; the fact he loathed the son of his boss; his friend Margaret's depressive state and the uneasy bond they happen to share. Certainly, the film misses a trick in not telling its story from a first person perspective, something which would have really allowed much of what Amis wrote to shine through in the form of voice-overs as the lead wades through the various situational mires he finds himself in.
"Lucky Jim", both the novel as well as this filmic adaptation, seem to occupy a strange place in history. They are works about rebellion, or at the very least the spirit of rebellion, set around a place of education and involving people very much attuned to an older guard coming up against someone whose feelings on much of what the older guard epitomises are, at best, susceptible to distrust. Made prior to the 1960's, it is tempting now to look upon the adaptation (less so the novel, whose writing has enabled it to withstand the test of time) as rather antiquated, in spite of its themes, though this is pre-eminently down to the immense power the counter-culture revolution had not long after it was made. So powerful was it, in fact, that it swept away near enough all that preceded it, including this very film. I imagine there was probably a very small window between about 1957 and 1966 wherein "Lucky Jim" would have been at its absolute zenith as an unruly comedy threatening upset, but not for long after.
We are informed during the film's opening shots that the action is to take place around a red brick university for the new 'Elizabethan age'. It is to be the sort of establishment which looks to the future with heady optimism; desperate to train the Francis Drakes and the Walter Raleighs of tomorrow - those who will become people synonymous with Britain's prestige and, I suppose, the sort of global indomitability you associate with explorers - in essence creators of the empire. Hindsight tells us, of course, that far less has come of the Elizabethan age than perhaps the captions were hoping, never mind the generations born therein it.
Occupying the rooms within the walls of the university itself sit the staff, dressed up in their extravagant gowns in an amphitheatre of wood panelling as they roll through their administrative business. A point is then made of how diametrically opposed our lead is to where he works in this regard when we move from the visuals of the above to surroundings more familiar to Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael): a small rented room in a modest house sporting a bed; a basin and just enough space for everything he needs. A lecturer in history at the university, Dixon has a number of things to juggle to begin with, primarily as to whether he will be kept on for the following year as the summer approaches by the establishment figure Professor Welch (Hugh Griffith), before obtaining a few more besides.
The joy is supposed to lie in watching Dixon's situation go from bad to worse, as a mountain of problems pile up with little in the way of a quick-fix presenting itself. Much of it is effective because so much of it lies in the fact Dixon is so powerless to solving what he stares down: the lecture he's asked to give on a subject he cannot seem to grasp and disagrees with anyway; getting a straight answer on the future of his job out of Welch who, at the best of times, seems too spaced out to even realise he risks losing Dixon, and a newfound attraction to the girl Welch's son, Bertrand (Terry Thomas), is dating.
This last problem is exacerbated by a friendship Dixon has with a certain Margaret Peel (Maureen Connell), a scatty and sometimes neurotic young woman who does not even appear in the film before other characters have had the chance to inform Dixon to 'watch out' for her. This is something thereafter confirmed to us when, having observed Jim in a casual conversation with yet another woman on campus, she merely assumes they were in a relationship and cannot help but be a little offended. Interestingly, though ultimately to the film's detriment, Peel's suicide attempt out of her husband leaving her prior to the events of the novel seems to have been left out of the film, perhaps for reasons pertaining to the want to have the film appear lighter in tone.
But it is Amis' crisp writing, his paragraphs wherein Carmichael's character outlines what he's thinking and feeling are those which we miss most; the pessimistic, self-deprecating passages in a novel whereby Jim never quite has a grip on things: 'He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense that that is where we really belong'; the mentioning of three cats somebody once owned named Ego, Superego and ID.; the frank conversations about love and relationships Dixon shares with Peel. Carmichael gives a very good performance with what he' offered of a man, in Dixon, building and building to the end of his tether, though the film too often feels like a series of quirky instances strung together for sake of a farcical laugh to be something one can love.
"Lucky Jim", both the novel as well as this filmic adaptation, seem to occupy a strange place in history. They are works about rebellion, or at the very least the spirit of rebellion, set around a place of education and involving people very much attuned to an older guard coming up against someone whose feelings on much of what the older guard epitomises are, at best, susceptible to distrust. Made prior to the 1960's, it is tempting now to look upon the adaptation (less so the novel, whose writing has enabled it to withstand the test of time) as rather antiquated, in spite of its themes, though this is pre-eminently down to the immense power the counter-culture revolution had not long after it was made. So powerful was it, in fact, that it swept away near enough all that preceded it, including this very film. I imagine there was probably a very small window between about 1957 and 1966 wherein "Lucky Jim" would have been at its absolute zenith as an unruly comedy threatening upset, but not for long after.
We are informed during the film's opening shots that the action is to take place around a red brick university for the new 'Elizabethan age'. It is to be the sort of establishment which looks to the future with heady optimism; desperate to train the Francis Drakes and the Walter Raleighs of tomorrow - those who will become people synonymous with Britain's prestige and, I suppose, the sort of global indomitability you associate with explorers - in essence creators of the empire. Hindsight tells us, of course, that far less has come of the Elizabethan age than perhaps the captions were hoping, never mind the generations born therein it.
Occupying the rooms within the walls of the university itself sit the staff, dressed up in their extravagant gowns in an amphitheatre of wood panelling as they roll through their administrative business. A point is then made of how diametrically opposed our lead is to where he works in this regard when we move from the visuals of the above to surroundings more familiar to Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael): a small rented room in a modest house sporting a bed; a basin and just enough space for everything he needs. A lecturer in history at the university, Dixon has a number of things to juggle to begin with, primarily as to whether he will be kept on for the following year as the summer approaches by the establishment figure Professor Welch (Hugh Griffith), before obtaining a few more besides.
The joy is supposed to lie in watching Dixon's situation go from bad to worse, as a mountain of problems pile up with little in the way of a quick-fix presenting itself. Much of it is effective because so much of it lies in the fact Dixon is so powerless to solving what he stares down: the lecture he's asked to give on a subject he cannot seem to grasp and disagrees with anyway; getting a straight answer on the future of his job out of Welch who, at the best of times, seems too spaced out to even realise he risks losing Dixon, and a newfound attraction to the girl Welch's son, Bertrand (Terry Thomas), is dating.
This last problem is exacerbated by a friendship Dixon has with a certain Margaret Peel (Maureen Connell), a scatty and sometimes neurotic young woman who does not even appear in the film before other characters have had the chance to inform Dixon to 'watch out' for her. This is something thereafter confirmed to us when, having observed Jim in a casual conversation with yet another woman on campus, she merely assumes they were in a relationship and cannot help but be a little offended. Interestingly, though ultimately to the film's detriment, Peel's suicide attempt out of her husband leaving her prior to the events of the novel seems to have been left out of the film, perhaps for reasons pertaining to the want to have the film appear lighter in tone.
But it is Amis' crisp writing, his paragraphs wherein Carmichael's character outlines what he's thinking and feeling are those which we miss most; the pessimistic, self-deprecating passages in a novel whereby Jim never quite has a grip on things: 'He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense that that is where we really belong'; the mentioning of three cats somebody once owned named Ego, Superego and ID.; the frank conversations about love and relationships Dixon shares with Peel. Carmichael gives a very good performance with what he' offered of a man, in Dixon, building and building to the end of his tether, though the film too often feels like a series of quirky instances strung together for sake of a farcical laugh to be something one can love.