English Film Maker John Boulting Dies

Film maker John Boulting, who with his twin brother Roy produced and directed a series of comedies that skewered a majority of England’s most venerated institutions, has died at the age of 71, it was learned Wednesday.

His family said only that he had died Monday in London. The cause of death was not given.

The twins, who also wrote many of their satires, are probably best known for “I’m All Right Jack,” a 1959 vehicle in which Peter Sellers enters the world of British industry as a leftist idealist and ends up provoking a nationwide strike. The inspiration for the picture reportedly came from the Boultings’ own experiences with trade unions in Britain’s film industry.

Another Boulting brothers’ movie, “Private’s Progress,” made in 1956, lampooned class warfare between commissioned officers and enlisted ranks in the British Army in the days when Britons were still facing conscription.

John Boulting and his surviving brother were born in Buckingham, England. John was the first to enter the film industry, albeit tangentially, when he took a job at age 20 as an office boy on Wardour Street, London’s commercial film center.

John had joined the British Labor Party in the 1930s and in the Spanish Civil War drove an ambulance in the International Brigade in support of the Republican side.

When John returned from Spain in 1937, he and his brother formed an independent company, Charter Films, each serving as producer on films directed by the other.

Their early efforts, “Pastor Hall,” a 1940 film about a German clergyman who was shot for denouncing the Nazis, and “Thunder Rock,” a 1942 picture dealing with a cynical journalist haunted by the ghosts of immigrants, were highly regarded by critics.

But their film activities were disrupted by World War II, when John Boulting became a lieutenant in the Royal Air Force.

Resuming movie-making after the war, they made “Fame Is the Spur” in 1947. It starred Sir Michael Redgrave as an upwardly mobile Socialist legislator and reportedly was based on the life of former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.

“The Guinea Pig” in 1949 starred Richard Attenborough as a working-class youngster coping with the snobberies of an expensive English boarding school. The film’s popularity was ensured when the Boultings managed to get the line “kick up the arse” past censors.

By the early 1950s, the brothers had begun to switch from melodrama to comedy. With East-West tensions running high, John Boulting said, “The world seemed so serious that the only thing to do was to laugh at it.”

They mocked lawyers in “Brothers in Law,” diplomats in “Carleton-Browne of the F.O.” and the Church of England in “Heavens Above.” The Boultings even chided marriage in ‘The Family Way,” a 1966 treatment of a Lancashire family fretting over a son who is unable to consummate his marriage.

Among the Boultings’ last pictures were “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” a 1970 sex comedy, and “Soft Beds, Hard Battles,” in which a group of Paris prostitutes help win World War II. John Boulting was married five times and had seven children.