Mackendrickland
Philip Kemp
Sight and Sound, Winter 1988/1989
Even in the British film industry, where Years of Crisis occur almost as frequently as wet summers, the memory of 1969 can still raise a reminiscent shudder or two among those who lived through it. That was the year when the Americans pulled the plug; the major Hollywood studios, which earlier in the decade had invested heavily in Britain, found their investment turning sour on them and began to cut their losses. In the general panic, the exit of one of the country’s most gifted film-makers passed almost unnoticed: Alexander Mackendrick quit directing to take up a teaching post at the California Institute for the Arts.
It wasn’t an abrupt move. “The feeling had been accumulating,” Mackendrick later remarked, “that I was in the wrong industry.” All the same, the local crisis contributed to his decision, since two of his most long-cherished projects had just fallen through. Rhinoceros, an adaptation of Ionesco’s play originally planned for Tony Hancock, had been refashioned for Peter Sellers, who was to play Berenger to Peter Ustinov’s Jean. The two Peters had never appeared together (and, in the event, never did); they could, as Mackendrick says, “have made a great team.” At the last minute Sellers, neurotically indecisive as ever, backed out, and with him vanished any chance of American financing.
Mackendrick’s other pet project, Mary Queen of Scots, had been around even longer – ever since his days at Ealing, where it was vetoed by Michael Balcon as “too disrespectful of royalty.” Over the years Mackendrick had worked on the script with various writers, in particular the novelist James Kennaway; at other times Gore Vidal and Anthony Burgess had taken a hand. Now, at last, production was going ahead. In an interview, Mackendrick provided a tantalising glimpse of the film he envisaged: “I’m going to cut the lace off the dialogue. My version is a gangster study which smells of cow-dung.” Mary Queen of Scots, from the sound of it, would have explored another of those collisions of irreconcilable, mutually incomprehending perceptions (Waggett on Todday, the High Wind children among the pirates) which recur throughout Mackendrick’s movies – in this case Mary as an elegant French lady stranded in a sixteenth-century Boot Hill, a ‘frontier territory populated by cut-throats, gangsters and cattle thieves.’ Sets were being constructed, and casting was under way, when the project foundered in the crash of Jay Kanter’s enterprising, ill-fated programme for Universal.
Not long after this debacle Mackendrick, rather to his surprise, was offered the Deanship of the Film School at the newly founded CalArts, and decided to accept. Britain, for the foreseeable future, could offer him few opportunities, and he had come to detest working in Hollywood. Nor did he have much taste, or aptitude, for the coming style of film-making in which closing the deal was often more important – and always far more time-consuming – than making the movie. “To spend, say, 50 per cent of your time trying to get the job, and 50 per cent doing the job – that’s a fair break. If you spend 95 per cent of your time trying to get the job, and only 5 per cent doing it, you’re in the wrong business.”
Mackendrick’s decision came at the end of a decade in which his career, hitherto set on a confident rising curve, had seemed to falter and lose direction. After five films at Ealing evincing increasing mastery in the expression of an ironically mordant, satirical vision – which, especially in the horror-comic mayhem of The Ladykillers, came close to bursting the bounds of the Ealing conventions – he had moved to the USA, where Hecht-Lancaster signed him to direct an adaptation of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. When the project bogged down in casting problems, Mackendrick switched instead to Sweet Smell of Success, an assignment about as far as could be imagined, in mood, tone and milieu, from the polished ironies of Shaw. Against all expectations, he brought it off triumphantly, adapting his personal vision to the alien genre and idiom with fluent authority.
On the strength of Sweet Smell – a box-office disaster, but received by most critics with wary respect – Mackendrick seemed poised to strike out in any direction he chose, equipped with the talent and experience to establish himself as a major director on an international scale. His first setback came with Devil’s Disciple, now recast and back on the rails. After ten days’ shooting he was fired from the picture, accused of working too slowly. His next assignment, The Guns of Navarone, ended even sooner. Carl Foreman, scripting as well as producing, resented Mackendrick’s attempts to elicit mythic and psychological complexity from the brash heroics of the plot and, with shooting scarcely begun, replaced him with J. Lee Thompson.
During the 1960s Mackendrick completed three films – all problematic, scarred less by production setbacks than by unresolved dissension over tone and concept. With Sammy Going South, his final partnership with Balcon, Mackendrick intended “the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against.” Balcon, for his part, saw it as a simple adventure, fit for a Royal Command Performance. Thanks to spiralling costs, assorted mishaps (not least Edward G. Robinson’s heart attack), and consequent script pruning, the film emerged somewhere midway between their two intentions, not wholly satisfying on either level.
A High Wind in Jamaica is a hard film to evaluate, since some quarter of it is missing. Mackendrick, who had longed to film Richard Hughes’ novel ever since meeting Hughes at Ealing in the late 1940s, discovered on landing the assignment that Fox, which owned the rights, expected a Disneyfied romp, with the eight-year-old Karen Dotrice as Emily and the pirate captain played by Terry-Thomas. With some help from Anthony Quinn, Mackendrick managed to wrench the script-and casting back towards the spirit of the original, but the shoot laboured under an inadequate budget and Zanuck’s hostility. Before releasing the picture, the studio chopped half an hour out of it and rearranged the rest. So far, no prints of the complete version have resurfaced.
Mackendrick’s last completed film was Don’t Make Waves, a Californian beach comedy with Tony Curtis. Rarely shown today, it remains his least-known picture, and one Mackendrick is still reluctant to discuss – “a film of such silliness that it is of no consequence, and it is a humiliation even to have to talk about it. But I think I proved the hard way that the kind of humour I had developed in Britain I, at least, cannot do in America – and I don’t think it transplants anyway.” Critical response mostly ranged from puzzled to dismissive, though the film has found admirers – Andrew Sarris and Basil Wright among them.
If Mackendrick can be considered a “neglected director,” it’s hardly in the sense of one whose work has been forgotten. Of his nine films, at least four – Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success – are widely known and frequently revived, and Sweet Smell seems to be ascending from the status of cult masterpiece to that of masterpiece tout court. But there has been surprisingly little recognition of Mackendrick’s overall achievement, nor – apart from some discerning passages in Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios – much attempt to consider his output as a whole, to trace recurrent structural patterns, thematic or stylistic connections within the body of his work.
To refer to ‘Mackendrick’s work’ is of course an over-simplification, and one which Mackendrick himself, who dislikes the ‘utterly unjustified cult of the director,’ would be the first to object to. The contributions of – for example – William Rose, James Wong Howe, Douglas Slocombe, Clifford Odets, Alec Guinness can hardly be ignored. None the less, there’s a good case for treating Mackendrick as the unifying creative force behind the films he directed. Fastidious in his choice of projects and exacting in his working methods, he exercised (except when physically prevented, as with High Wind) a high degree of control over all aspects of the film-making process, involving himself closely in everything from scriptwriting to soundtrack, working for weeks with the sound crew of The Man in the White Suit to realise just the desired jaunty, bubbling effect for Stratton’s bizarre apparatus.
The distinctive visual quality of the films, the dramatic density of their cinematic language, can also be credited – more so, perhaps, than with certain more feted directors – primarily to Mackendrick himself. His technique of storyboarding his pictures, sketching every set-up in vivid, fluent strokes conveying with startling economy composition, lighting and camera angle, ensured the emergence of (in Douglas Slocombe’s words) ‘a strong pattern, a very strong hallmark-every image succinctly plotted to make its point.’ The scripts of Mackendrick’s films, as Geoff Brown has noted, are never merely words awaiting illustration, but are conceived from the outset in richly visual terms.
But in the end, whatever the supporting testimony of working methods, the films themselves must be what count; and Mackendrick’s work does present a demonstrable creative unity. Any ostensible gap between the Ealing period and the four later films is more apparent than real, tending on closer examination to elide into a matter of surface tone. It’s a break, perhaps, more significant in historical terms, marking as it does the abrupt change in working conditions that Mackendrick encountered after the supportive atmosphere of Balcon’s studio, and that would eventually lead to his withdrawal from directing.
The reputation of Mackendrick’s Ealing films has suffered from the tendency – still widespread, despite Barr’s definitive study – for the term ‘Ealing’ to be applied as indiscriminately as ‘Hollywood’ once was, before Cahiers du cinéma taught us all better. By this usage, the studio’s entire Balcon-era output (and the comedies in particular) can be lumped together into one undifferentiated mass, and branded with some such disparaging epithet as ‘whimsical’ or ‘cosy. Thus, even so perceptive a writer as Tom Milne, reviewing Local Hero, could criticize Bill Forsyth’s film for taking ‘a retrograde step back into the cosy Ealing ethos of Whisky Galore! and The Maggie.’
Such a judgment – though it disregards Mackendrick’s skill in working simultaneously both with and against that ethos in ironic counterpoint – can claim some support from Michael Balcon himself, who maintained in his autobiography that ‘in our comedies there was nothing unfriendly or ruthless.’ But this was Balcon towards the end of his life, looking back in sentimental reminiscence, and discounting much that disturbed him at the time. To anyone approaching Mackendrick’s comedies without preconceptions, ‘ruthless’ is surely the very word that comes to mind. In Whisky Galore! the wretched Englishman, Waggett, is continually mocked and humiliated by the people of Todday, and finally blown off the island in a gale of callous laughter. Another hapless outsider, the American tycoon Marshall, is cheated, abused and physically assaulted by the crew of The Maggie. The Man in the White Suit himself, the young scientist Sidney Stratton, ends up fleeing from a lynch mob of workers and bosses, and The Ladykillers culminates in a whole string of brutal murders. The world of Mackendrick’s comedies is about as cosy as a snakepit.
Local Hero, indeed, provides a revealing comparison. Forsyth’s admiration for Mackendrick’s work is well known, and his film does, as Milne observes, recall aspects of both the earlier Scots comedies (besides borrowing Burt Lancaster, grown mellow and benign, from Sweet Smell). Local Hero also captures something of the mood of Mackendrick’s films – the irony and truculence, the shrewdly observed detail and the underlying melancholy. But Forsyth’s regard is essentially benevolent, and the film’s ending, in which the conflicting interests of all parties are harmoniously resolved, aligns it with the gentler Ealing tradition of Passport to Pimlico.
Far closer to the Mackendrick spirit – so close, in fact, that it can be read as a covert remake of Whisky Galore! – is Robin Hardy’s 1973 offbeat cult movie, The Wicker Man. The Waggett-figure of the principled outsider here becomes a devout Glasgow cop, horrified to discover that the people of the offshore island to which he’s summoned have converted en masse to full-blooded paganism. And since his unbending integrity is no match, any more than was Waggett’s, for the joyous cunning of the islanders, he too is tricked, manipulated and finally sacrificed – literally this time, this being after all a horror movie rather than a comedy – for the good of the community. Hardy’s direction may lack Mackendrick’s finesse; but in its thematic preoccupations at least – perception and misperception, innocence outwitted by amoral experience – and its stark denial of reconciliation, The Wicker Man could stand in for the horror movie that Mackendrick never made.
Charles Barr has written of the Ealing ‘mainstream’ comedies – broadly, those scripted by T. E. B. Clarke – that ‘they constitute a whimsical daydream of how things might be. Mackendrick’s comedies are in touch with how things actually operate.’ This shouldn’t be taken too literally – Mackendrick rarely aims at realism, and the crooks of The Ladykillers are as stylised a gang, albeit in a very different register, as those of The Lavender Hill Mob. But the two films aptly demonstrate the distance between Mackendrick’s gleefully black-veined comedy and that of his Ealing colleagues (Robert Hamer always excepted). Both feature Alec Guinness as gang boss, but the later film’s savage killings – or any killings at all, come to that – would be unthinkable in The Lavender Hill Mob, shattering its gentle make-believe of innocuous villainy.
Ealing comedies, indeed Ealing films in general, are much concerned with the matter of community – how it can be constituted, what sustains or impairs its existence. But if the very word conjures up in this context a warm, all-inclusive, come-into-the-parlour atmosphere, those portrayed by Mackendrick are quite different. The communities of his films – as of Hamer’s – are close, dangerous and intensely self-protective, ready to welcome outsiders only on their own exacting terms and vindictive against those that threaten them. ‘Any man who stands between us and the whisky is an enemy,’ states Sammy MacCodrum with uncompromising simplicity; war is declared on Waggett, and Waggett is destroyed. Whisky Galore! may be a comedy, but it’s also the tragedy of Captain Waggett, and all the funnier for that.
The humour of Mackendrick’s comedies persistently homes in on pain. Mackendrick himself cites Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter (‘The only good book I’ve read on the subject’) for the thesis that comedy, to be effective, must deal with matters that would be unbearable, were they not treated playfully. ‘It’s that hidden element of the intolerable in comedy that separates it from triviality.’ Only a slight shift of tone, and The Man in the White Suit could be reshot, virtually scene-for-scene, as a tragedy – just as it’s not too difficult to imagine Sweet Smell of Success being remade (by Billy Wilder, say; The Apartment lies only a block or two away) as the blackest of comedies.
In defining the ‘perverted and malicious sense of humour’ that informs his films, Mackendrick recalls relating the plot of The Man in the White Suit to a Scottish friend. “I was trying to make it sound as entertaining as possible, and all the way through the most I could get out of him was a slight smile and a glint in the eye. But when I came to the end, when the scientist is practically lynched by both sides – at that point he gave a Gaelic guffaw and said: ‘Sandy, that’s very good. That’s very good. That’s not funny!’ And I think that’s as good a definition as any.”
Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett once noted, discerned the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities. The same could be said of Mackendrick; the world of his films is precarious, undermined by the imminence of collapse. Large, imposing structures, such as buildings or ships, are revealed as frail and vulnerable. A High Wind in Jamaica and Sammy Going South both begin, and Don’t Make Waves ends, with the destruction of a house. Ships are wrecked, or nearly so, in Whisky Galore! and The Maggie. In The Man in the White Suit a laboratory is devastated by explosions. In The Maggie a pier is ripped apart. The house in The Ladykillers is rickety, knocked lopsided by bombing, while that in Mandy stands isolated and ringed by bomb-sites, like the last tooth in a carious jaw.
The structures of society, when tested, prove equally unreliable. Religion scarcely figures; families are absent or oppressive; and the complacent institutions of the social hierarchy rarely inspire confidence. People in authority, from the luckless Captain Buncher of the SS ‘Cabinet Minister’ (‘I’m telling you, we’re nowhere near any island,’ he growls a split second before the ship strikes) to High Wind’s craven and drunken Captain Marpole, invariably show up badly. Officialdom, when not corrupt, is mostly ineffectual; if the law intervenes, it either manages to abet the criminal, (Whisky Galore!, The Ladykillers), or to punish the wrong person (The Maggie, High Wind), or both (Sweet Smell). The resolution of Mackendrick’s films is never to be looked for from external forces; there’s no Seventh Cavalry on the way, no god emerging from the machine.
This same uncertainty principle infests his characters, subverting their beliefs, gnawing surreptitiously away at the underpinnings of their mental universes. Sidney Stratton, the last seemingly solid ground knocked from under him by his aged landlady, finds his assumptions disintegrating along with his miracle fabric. Like so many others in Mackendrick’s films – Waggett, Marshall, Mandy’s father and grandparents, Sidney Falco, even the monstrous and all-powerful J. J. Hunsecker – Stratton is forced to confront phenomena that refuse to fit the pre-set pattern he thought to impose on them. Certainty, in the light of Mackendrick’s ironic scepticism, represents a provocation, an absurd delusion ripe for the demolition squad.
Only one character in all his films retains her absolutes intact, sailing through every peril serenely unscathed. More formidable in this even than Hunsecker, whose sexual obsession leaves him vulnerable, the sweet, soft, pink-and-white Mrs Wilberforce (The Ladykillers) effortlessly defeats – so effortlessly that she never so much as notices having done it – the five criminals ranged against her. With her household gods (the parrots and dear dead Captain W) to tell her right from wrong, she is, as Professor Marcus recognises even as he sinks into giggling dementia, terrifyingly indestructible. “It would take twenty or thirty or forty perhaps to deal with her, because we’ll never be able to kill her, Louis. She’ll always be with us, for ever and ever and ever, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Mackendrick’s characters frequently find not just their systems of belief but even their very identities under attack. Waggett, whose pompous insistence on his honorary rank (“Captain Waggett, if you don’t mind”) meets with bland disregard, is reduced to incoherent splutterings – “This is lunacy! It’s me – I – I – I – I am Captain Waggett!” – only to be countered by calm Hebridean logic: “Ah, but how do I know that you’re Captain Waggett?” Chavez, the pirate chief in High Wind (yet another insecure Captain), constantly worries about his authority going unrespected (“This is a serious ship! … Nobody listens”), clinging with absurd insistence to his comic-opera cocked hat, and reacting in disproportionate fury when the children toss it around the deck. The self is a disconcertingly fragile construct. “Madam,” snarls the distraught Carlo Cofield, rendered carless, possessionless and trouserless a bare five minutes into Don’t Make Waves, “in thirty seconds you’ve managed to wipe me out.”
In visual terms, Mackendrick often expresses this kind of psychological onslaught by a redefinition of the cinematic space within which a given character is located. Sidney Stratton, fleeing the lynch mob, twists and turns through a warren of narrow alleys, a jump or two ahead of the game. Rounding a corner, he encounters Mrs Watson, receives her coup de grâce – and suddenly there opens around him a clear field, an arena with him at the centre and his pursuers homing in through every access point. And at the beginning of Sammy Going South, Sammy leaves the enclosed world of his apartment for just such another maze of alleyways, moving through them with practised ease, only to emerge into the open space of the harbour (emphasised by the full expanse of the ’scope screen, unleashed for the first time in the film) where the lethal warplanes can come screaming down on him from a clear blue sky. Then after the attack, running terrified for home, he finds the alleys stopped by rubble and locked gates – the safely familiar now become dangerous and strange.
In Sweet Smell of Success, nothing and nowhere is safe, no matter how familiar it may seem. In this, the most restless and insecure of films, Sidney Falco scarcely dares stay still for a second – and the same goes for the camera, endlessly sidling and reframing as if infected by his nervousness. Even when seated, Falco is all movement, twitching and fidgeting, his eyes, hands and mouth executing constant nimble manoeuvrings to evade attack or stake out a more advantageous position. Occasionally, feeling the trap closing on him, he tries to assert a fragile moral ascendancy, rising from Hunsecker’s table in implausible outrage, or scrambling up an overhead walkway to distance himself from Kello, the venal cop who incarnates his bloated alter ego. In vain: Falco is trapped in the smoky, claustrophobic world of clubs and bars, in the no less claustrophobic New York streets, as in the rat-runs of his own nature. “You’re in jail, Sidney,” remarks Hunsecker, dispassionately contemptuous. “You’re a prisoner of your own fears, your own greed and ambition.”
If Sweet Smell shows us entrapment in terms of scurrying, febrile movement, Mandy offers its (British?) counterpart – entrapment as stasis, a retreat into the illusive security of a petrified inertia. Denied the chance to break out of her muteness, Mandy is consigned to her father’s stiflingly respectable family, a household patterned after the Cartesian dichotomy: downstairs lives the grandmother, all mindless emotion, the grandfather sits upstairs playing, not just chess, but postal chess – the most cerebral of games, divorced from even minimal human contact. For playing-space the child has a walled garden, sterile and stony, in which nothing grows but a sundial on which the sun never seems to shine. Outside lies forbidden, undisciplined territory: a wasteground, where cheerfully unkempt children shout and run, and into which Mandy, in the final reel, manages to escape, moving like Sammy from the familiar into the unfamiliar. If openness connotes danger, it also means freedom; both Sammy and Mandy are granted the space to find themselves, to take their own risks.
These moments which define the scope of a character’s perception – by the sudden opening-out of a hitherto restricted horizon. or by contrasting a closed mentality with a more receptive one – are crucial to Mackendrick’s films. Early in The Man in the White Suit, Birnley, being shown round Corland’s Mill, spots Stratton’s apparatus burbling away in a corner, and asks what it is. Mackendrick holds the angle, through the foregrounded apparatus, while the screen gradually fills with bemused figures, arguing, talking across each other – a perfect image of a costive, self-cancelling society. But Mackendrick deftly uses the scene to make two further points. Birnley is far too amused by Corland’s discomfiture to notice anything else – just as, later, his delight in putting one over on his competitors blinds him to the wider implications of the miracle fabric. Daphne, his daughter, is the only person present who observes Stratton’s trolley nosing in through the door, and then as quietly withdrawing. Not only, we learn, is Daphne more aware, readier to see and to think about what she sees – she’s also (a key factor in the plot) more open to what Stratton is doing.
The act of perception – the way in which our preconceived attitudes lead us to read, or misread, a situation – is central to Mackendrick’s films. Repeatedly, his characters are defined by how they look – both in the immediate sense of how they appear to others, and (equally important) in the sense of how they use their eyes, seeing or failing to see, discounting whatever doesn’t match their expectations. Innocence is dangerous, to itself and to others; those who observe the uncertainty principle, mistrusting appearances, are the more likely to survive (though not invariably, witness Mrs Wilberforce). The clear-sighted manipulators – Macroon, and MacTaggart, Kierlaw and Hunsecker – may be morally reprehensible, but Mackendrick can never withhold from them a certain reluctant fascination.
The lucidity of Mackendrick’s style, whose technique, accomplished and inventive though it is, never obtrudes itself into the narrative, serves the same central concern: that we, as spectators, should be invited into the process of perception, allowed to see and evaluate for ourselves. No matter how confused the action on screen, Mackendrick presents it with unfailing clarity. The scene in which Stratton tries to gain entrance to Birnley’s house juggles half a dozen conflicting elements of farcical complexity; the characters involved are at hopeless cross-purposes, yet the audience is never in a moment’s doubt as to exactly what’s happening, and where. By the same token, Mackendrick makes only rare use of extreme close-ups or subjective shots, always preferring to let us judge events whole and unprompted, to choose our own perspective rather than imposing that of one character or another.
It’s possible, even, that this very quality of lucidity may partly explain the relative critical neglect of Mackendrick’s work – that clarity has been taken for a lack of subtlety or depth. There may be something more urgently enticing, to the critical eye, in directors like Powell or Roeg, whose narrative line is often of such patent eccentricity, whose imagery is so evidently packed with hermetic tropes, as to signal immediately that things are going on beneath the surface, inviting excavation. (Which isn’t, of course, to disparage either, but merely to register an essential difference in style). If so, a disservice has been done. Mackendrick’s films, certainly, can be enjoyed on the most superficial narrative level – in itself no negligible achievement. But they also offer richness of cinematic language, a satisfying visual and thematic complexity, and a distinctively individual tone, that yield increasing returns on each repeated viewing. As always in Mackendrick’s cinema, the exercise of perception is its own reward.
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