Alexander Mackendrick was born on 8 September 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts, but raised in Glasgow, where he attended Glasgow High School and the city’s art school. He began his career as an artist in advertising. In 1937, he and a cousin wrote a script that was filmed, much altered, as Midnight Menace. The same year he joined J. Arthur Rank’s Pinewood Studios, working as a scriptwriter on shorts like Pocket Cartoon (1941), Carnival in the Clothes Cupboard (1942), Fable of the Fabrics (1943), and the Abu series. During the last part of World War II he served with an army film unit in Italy.
In 1946, Mackendrick was taken on at Ealing Studios to sketch camera set-ups. The studios, in the western suburbs of London, had been moderately successful during the 1930s with movies built around music-hall stars like Gracie Fields and George Formby. Michael Balcon became head of production in 1938 and built up a tight-knit team of technicians and artists who were given every opportunity to “rise through the ranks.” During World War II, Ealing concentrated mainly on realistic topical dramas, with a few broad comedies for light relief. It was not until the late 1940s that the studio addressed its famous team spirit to the highly distinctive comedies for which it will always be remembered. The first recognizable ‘Ealing comedy’ was Charles Crichton’s Hue and Cry (1947), scripted by T. E. B. Clarke, the principal begetter of the genre, which characteristically combined a well-observed and realistic milieu with a more or less fantastic plot. Around this time Mackendrick graduated to scriptwriting, earning his first Ealing credit on Basil Dearden’s Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948). Then, in 1948-1949, Ealing released the three remarkable comedies that put the studio firmly on the map as a major force in British filmmaking: Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and Mackendrick’s first film as a director, Whisky Galore! (called Tight Little Island in the United States).
Adapted by Angus Macphail and Compton Mackenzie from the latter’s novel, Whisky Galore! is set during World War II on the Hebridean island of Todday. The last drop of whisky on the island has gone and black depression reigns when a ship carrying fifty thousand cases of the precious liquid is wrecked offshore. The local Home Guard captain, a priggish Englishman, mounts a guard over the cargo, and a battle of wits develops between him and the shrewd islanders. With a ruthlessness that even Mackendrick himself reportedly found increasingly hard to stomach, Captain Waggett is crushed and humiliated, eventually being recalled to the mainland charged with smuggling the whiskey he had tried so hard to save.
The film was made on location on a real Hebridean island (Barra), even the interiors being shot there in a church hall converted into makeshift studios. Monia Danischewsky, Balcon’s associate producer, has described the filming (and Mackendrick’s moody perfectionism) in his autobiography, White Russian, Red Face. Barra islanders played bit parts, and the splendid professional cast included Basil Radford, who gave the performance of his career as the pompous but touchingly sincere Waggett; Gordon Jackson and Bruce Seton as, respectively, his second-in-command and his sergeant (their loyalties sadly divided by their attachment to two island girls, played by Joan Greenwood and Gabrielle Blunt); and Wylie Watson as Waggett’s principal opponent (and father of the two girls). Compton Mackenzie had a small part and Finlay Currie was the narrator.
Whisky Galore! was both a financial and a critical success, and has survived innumerable revivals. Matthew Norgate attributed Mackendrick’s inspired handling of his mixed cast of actors and nonprofessionals to his background in documentary, and praised the “joyous irony” of the story in which, for example, the pious islanders, intent on large-scale theft, postpone their criminal activities until the Sabbath is over. Charles Barr, in Ealing Studios, points out that in this, as in most of Mackendrick’s films, the theme is “a battle of wits opposing people of different conditioning and with different drives,” through which the director expresses in highly visual terms his central insight that “perception is not mechanical but a function of circumstances, motivation, preconceptions.”
Like Ealing comedies, Whisky Galore! develops an extravagant plot in a precisely observed setting, but Charles Barr has shown how different this “cruel and clever” film is from more typical Ealing products, described by Martin Green as “nice and holesome and harmless.” The same is true of Mackendrick’s second feature. “I wonder what would have happened,” the director said once, “if I had proposed to Sir Michael Balcon an earnest and gripping drama exposing the viciousness of some leaders of a British industry who combined with shop stewards and workers in an attempt to bribe, to morally corrupt, kidnap, and finally try to lynch an idealistic young man who was trying to offer the benefits of science to humanity? It is a rather brutal theme… But we made it; we called it The Man in the White Suit, and because it was a comedy with Alec Guinness nobody objected at all.”
The idealistic young man is a scientist who has invented a dirt-repelling and indestructible fabric – a boon that capital and labor combine to suppress by any means whatever. Scripted by Roger MacDougall, John Dighton, and the director, this brilliantly comic film is also a totally ruthless analysis of the causes and effects of stagnation in British industry, directed by well-bred incompetents and manned by the system’s apathetic victims. If the film offers any hope at all, it is in the person of Daphne (Joan Greenwood), daughter of the hero’s employer, who possesses both the vision to comprehend the value of the new fabric, and the realism to deal with the system on its own terms.
Mandy (Crash of Silence), which followed in 1952, is not a comedy but an adaptation of a novel by Hilda Lewis about a child (Mandy Miller) who has been born deaf. Her mother (Phyllis Calvert) wants her to go to a school where she can learn to cope with her condition but her father Harry (Terence Morgan) and dominating grandparents try to ‘protect’ her from contact with other children. When she is sent to a school for the deaf, Harry becomes jealous of his wife’s close (but innocent) relationship with the school’s dedicated headmaster (Jack Hawkins) and carries Mandy off to his parents’ house. Her demonstration that she has learned to read forces her grandfather (Godfrey Tearle) to reassess the situation and to help his son to do so too.
There was much praise for the ‘documentary’ aspects of the film, dealing with Mandy’s life and work at the school, and for the extraordinary performance Mackendrick had drawn from his young star, but most critics dismissed the adult drama as conventional padding. Charles Barr disagrees, finding “an intense irony in the way Mandy’s slow struggle to perceive and communicate goes in parallel with, and is retarded by, the adults’ elementary failure to perceive and communicate.” Barr points out that “the imagery of looking and not looking permeates the film,” as when Mandy’s failure as a baby to respond to Harry’s voice is echoed in Harry’s later failure to ‘hear’ his father: “When Harry finally turns round, the movement is a release, signifying his readiness, at last, to look and think and trust… I find Mandy one of the most affecting of all British films. Its modest story is worked out with such scrupulous care and craft, and it moves to an ending which, in a very honest combination, is both momentous and tentative.”
The Maggie (High and Dry, 1954), though moderately successful, is the weakest of Mackendrick’s Ealing films – another ruthless comedy, and indeed a rather sour one, this time dealing with the struggle between a dynamic American tycoon (Paul Douglas) and the aging skipper (Alex Mackenzie) of an aging cargo boat. Through a series of misunderstandings, the Maggie is hired to carry the tycoon’s furniture to his new vacation home on the Scottish coast, a load and a journey that are both beyond the capacities of the old boat. The Maggie survives the attempt, but the American loses every round of the conflict, his furniture, and his wife’s respect. The thoroughness of his humiliation, resembling Waggett’s in Whisky Galore!, drew a protest from Time magazine against the film’s rather simplistic anti-Americanism, to which Mackendrick replied that both he and his scenarist, William Rose, were themselves American-born.
William Rose also scripted the much better movie that followed, The Ladykillers (1955), which grew out of a nightmare in which he dreamed that five men were trying to kill an old lady. The film has Katie Johnson as the old lady, a gracious relic of a gentler age who lives in a little London street with her pet parrots. Short of cash, she takes in five lodgers, an oddly assorted crew led by the gentlemanly but sinister Professor (Alec Guinness) and claiming to be the members of a string quintet. In fact, they are a gang planning a payroll heist. This succeeds (with the old lady’s unwitting help), but Mrs. Wilberforce then becomes a candidate for murder at the hands of these rogues and thugs, who are meanwhile constrained to take tea with her and her genteel friends. She is saved when the gang quarrel over the spoils and wipe each other out. Then, having tried but failed to put the facts before a politely disbelieving policeman Jack Warner, she is obliged to keep the money herself.
Penelope Houston called The Ladykillers “the most consistently ruthless comic fantasy produced by a British studio since Kind Hearts and Coronets [though it is] rougher and more openly farcical in story and attitude… The resemblance is restricted to the way in which a comic idea of splendid, savage absurdity is elaborated in an atmosphere of steadily mounting fantasy… The brakes are never applied, the fantasy runs on unchecked to a conclusion which has its own lunatic logicality . . . the macabre humour of the later scenes – the disposal of the corpses via British RaiIways, the abrupt elimination of the Professor – has a tough inevitability.”
The Ladykillers, with Whisky Galore! the best of Mackendrick’s Ealing films, was also his last for that studio. After it, he went off to the United States to make Sweet Smell of Success for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. Burt Lancaster plays J. J. Hunsecker, a dangerously influential New York columnist who employs his jackal Sidney Falco to engineer a smear campaign against the young musician his sister loves. The power that Hunsecker wields and the general corruption of his world are revealed with a kind of horrified relish until Falco, pushed too hard, turns on his master and brings down the entire degenerate empire.
The film’s journalistic jargon and allusions made it a little hard to follow, especially for foreign audiences, but it was otherwise greatly praised for its unremitting pace and tension, its script (by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman), its photography (by James Wong Howe), and for Tony Curtis’ tour de force performance as the slimy press agent Sidney Falco. It was an impressive American debut for Mackendrick, who was said to have responded “intensely to an environment of greater professionalism [and] energy” than Ealing had provided.
On the other hand, perhaps because of the savagery of its social criticism, Sweet Smell of Success made relatively little money. This was no doubt a factor in the five-year gap that followed before Mackendrick completed his next film, Sammy Going South (A Boy Ten Feet Tall, 1962). Based on a novel by W. H. Canaway, it is an account of the five-thousand-mile journey – from Egypt to South Africa – made by the ten-year-old hero after he is orphaned in the Suez crisis. There was praise for the section of the film in which an odd friendship develops between Sammy and a tough old diamond smuggler (Edward G. Robinson), but by and large the movie was dismissed as a rather Disneyish travelogue.
However, Mackendrick himself has pointed out that “every adult character that Sammy comes in contact with, he destroys,” going on to suggest that innocence is not necessarily a virtue it “can also be a kind of savagery.” If the critics missed this implication in Sammy, they could scarcely do so in Mackendrick’s next film, where it is the whole point of the story. A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) is based on a remarkable novel by Richard Hughes, whom Mackendrick had met when the latter did some scriptwriting at Ealing around 1950. At some point in the nineteenth century five children are sent home from Jamaica to be educated in England. Along the way, they fall into the hands of a ferocious shipload of pirates. And it is not the children but these ignorant and superstitious cutthroats who are terrified – and with good reason. In the end the pirates hang – not because they have in any way harmed the children, but for a killing actually committed by the eldest girl, the eleven-year-old Emily (Deborah Baxter).
The children accept the situation as an agreeable treat – even the accidental death of one of them suggests no more than the availability of an extra blanket. But the pirates are increasingly disturbed by the children’s incomprehensible pastimes – especially when, in a brilliantly edited sequence, they remove the ship’s female figurehead from the bow. (Mackendrick has acknowledged that this was intended to symbolize the invasion of his male society by the female principle, and more particularly the captain’s growing desire for Emily conveyed with uncharacteristic delicacy in Anthony Quinn’s performance.)
Philip French wrote that “the spirit of the book is fairly consistently sustained: the delicate and rapid shifts of mood from the comic to the chilling, the slow erosion of the pirates’ nervous sodality by the deadly intruders, the sense of children as innocently merciless and unaccountable subversives.” French was one of a number of critics moved by the epilogue in a sunny London park after the execution of the pirates, and the “fleeting expression of some deeply buried memory on the face of Emily as she watches a model sailing ship being borne away across the pond.”
Mackendrick’s last film was Don’t Make Waves (1967), a lightweight farcical comedy touching on bodybuilding, salesmanship, sex, and other aspects of the California way of life. There was some praise for Tony Curtis’ performance in the lead, but most reviewers found the movie limp and weakly scripted. Mackendrick then worked for a time in television and the theatre, mostly in the United States, until in 1969 he accepted the post of dean of the film department at the new California Institute of the Arts. He resigned in 1978, after a somewhat controversial decade as dean, but continued to teach at the Institute until his death on 22 December 1993 at the age of 81.
A “tall, disheveled man,” Mackendrick was said to have been something of a tyrant on the set, and a “ruthless perfectionist.” Directing a crowd of extras with no lines to speak, he would provide them with a detailed story to act out. The amount of money stolen in The Ladykillers was £60,000 because Mackendrick had taken the trouble to find out bow much could be packed into the thieves’ music cases.
Charles Barr considers that Mackendrick’s Ealing films “amount to by far the most interesting set of films to be made by any director in England, let alone Ealing, in the dead decade of the fifties.” Barr calls Mackendrick “a notably cinematic, visually acute director… It is above all his distinctive cinematic language, in the widest sense, that separates Mackendrick from his Ealing contemporaries and enables him to follow an individual path while apparently fitting squarely into the Ealing tradition.”
From World Film Directors, Volume II (1988), edited by John Wakeman
© John Wakeman/H.W. Wilson Company
All rights reserved by the original copyright holders