Mirth, Malevolence, Murder: The Ealing Comedies of Alexander Mackendrick
Neil Sinyard
“To put it quite bluntly,” opined the late, lamented François Truffaut in 1966, “isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’?” Truffaut felt that the subdued emotion and unshowy visual modesty characteristic of British film (and the British themselves, he thought) were qualities that were in essence anti-cinematic. His views harmonised with those entertained by British academics of the Movie school of film criticism, whose hostility to the baleful bourgeois humanism of the British “new wave” (A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving etc.) was matched only by their admiration for mainstream Hollywood panache. In 1968, Alan Lovell could deliver an unpublished seminar paper on British film to the British Film Institute with the spectacularly unassertive title ‘The Unknown Cinema.’ As late as 1977, the educationalist Philip Simpson could accurately point out that, in the class rooms of media studies, there were still more expeditions being undertaken to John Ford’s Monument Valley than to Michael Balcon’s Ealing Green.
Thankfully, times have changed. In recent years there has been a proliferation of books on aspects of British film, stimulated unquestionably by the recent vitality of the national product and the impetus given by creative sources as various as Channel 4, producers such as David Puttnam and Simon Perry, and directors as diversely talented as Bill Forsyth, Neil Jordan and Michael Radford. (No doubt a factor that has helped is a current phenomenon of the cinema, which is that America is making the worst films in its history.) Inevitably, this has led to the re-evaluation of the heritage, particularly of the extraordinary decade in British film after the Second World War when directors like David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations), Carol Reed (The Fallen Idol, The Third Man), Powell and Pressburger (Black Narcissus), Lawrence Olivier (Hamlet) and Robert Hamer (It Always Rains on Sunday, Kind Hearts and Coronets) were producing some of their best work and, in some cases, establishing their international careers. For me, the crowning glory of this period are the Ealing comedies of Alexander Mackendrick – Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers (1955).
A brief word of background first about Ealing Studios and about Alexander Mackendrick. Under the “benevolent paternalism” of Michael Balcon (which, according to Mackendrick and writer T. E. B. Clarke, generally meant comparative freedom in return for low pay), the Ealing Studio prided itself on a kind of family atmosphere with a regular ensemble of actors, writers and technicians and an overall unanimity of aim and tone. Over a period of three decades until its closure of film production in 1958, its aim was to project a picture of Britain and the British character. The sense of family in the studio extended to their vision of Britain as a kind of family – sometimes, as George Orwell said of England “a family with the wrong members in control.” Its perspective was predominantly middle-class Liberal (reflecting Balcon’s own values): its recurring subject the aspirations and secret desires of the lower middle-classes: its tone, in the comedies and in the dramas, affectionate rather than abrasive. The Britain presented was lovably eccentric rather than dangerously insane. Bureaucracy and pompous authoritarianism were satirised (as in, for example, Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob), but in a tone of gentle whimsy rather than anarchic anger.
Perhaps it is significant that the two most recalcitrant members of the Ealing team, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, were to do the best work. Hamer had his clashes with Balcon over Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) which nevertheless still cuts through the usually comfortable Ealing tone with a hilarious but mordant observation on social and class injustices and hypocrisies and with a frank acknowledgement of sexual indiscretions. Although a less brazen and abrasive personality than Hamer, Mackendrick also differed from the Ealing norm in his unusually long periods of rehearsal and in his painstaking working methods (in later years, away from Ealing, these traits were to get him into trouble). As we shall see, thematically his films, in comparison with those of his Ealing colleagues, were also out of the ordinary.
Born in Boston in 1912 to Scottish parents who were on a visit to America, Mackendrick had joined Ealing in 1947 as a sketch artist, having gained some experience of films during the war as a member of a specialist film unit in Italy. He worked as a writer on famous Ealing films such as Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), The Blue Lamp (1950) and Dance Hall (1950). But, as Balcon said, “he wanted to be a director.”
What kind of films did he want to direct? In an interview with the French film magazine Positif in 1968, Mackendrick ventured two statements which offer a revealing insight into his attitude to comedy. “Personally,” he said, “I am very attracted by comedy, or rather by a certain kind of comedy… It lets you do things that are too dangerous or that a certain audience can’t accept.” If one were to place Mackendrick in a film comedy tradition, his associates would not be Ealing-esque colleagues but bilious transatlantic satirists like Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Stanley Kubrick, or bold Eastern European dissidents like Peter Bacso or Milos Forman. Like them, Mackendrick’s speciality is black comedy whose main element is surprise, whose humour extends the boundaries of acceptability in main stream cinema and whose intention, under cover of laughter, is to sneak in an uncomfortable social truth. Mackendrick may also be compared with Alfred Hitchcock in his ability to marry the hilarity of comedy with the excitement of the chase, and to give a diabolical moral complexity to the seemingly straightforward mechanisms of linear narrative.
The second Positif quotation which seems particularly apposite to Mackendrick’s approach is his comment on The Man in the White Suit. “A man lives in a social group,” Mackendrick says. “This group seems normal and he abnormal. Little by little, you realise that it is he who is full of good sense. In a psychotic world, neurotics seem normal.” The deceptiveness of appearance, the lone individual in a hostile community, the radical revision of people’s perceptions of normality and abnormality, are to be pervasive themes in Mackendrick’s films.
These themes are a good deal more challenging and sophisticated than is customary in the Ealing product, which makes the films themselves an implicit critique of the bland values contained in the Ealing film. Mackendrick’s films are comedies not of suburban eccentricities but of social disruption. They are films of cruelty and cunning more than coyness and charm. People do not slip beguilingly on banana skins but get cracked, near-fatally, over the head. When the scientist in The Man in the White Suit is felled in that way and it is discovered that he is still alive, the wheezing company boss Sir John bleakly comments: “Pity.” The young boy in The Maggie apologises for almost killing the American, but then adds: “Ay, but I’d do it again!” Characters in Mackendrick take their emotions to near-murderous extremes: none of Truffaut’s passionlessness here. This unusual emotional range is quite removed from the cosy complacencies of conventional Ealing cinema and the reason why his films seem at once invigorating and incredibly gruelling. His characters are not gracious and bumbling, but often ghoulish and grotesque, and observed with a cynical realism. The humour springs from the sheer energy and ingenuity with which they pursue their Machiavellian schemes.
Before characterising Mackendrick’s Ealing comedies in a little more detail, I will briefly outline the plots. Whisky Galore! deals with the battle of wits that develops between a Home Guard Captain (Basil Radford) and a Hebridean community when a shipload of whisky is wrecked off their coast. The parched islanders are determined to get their hands on what they thought had been a “departing spirit,” Captain Waggett equally determined to discourage what he regards as unprincipled looting. The Man in the White Suit concerns the furore amongst businessmen and workmen when a secluded Cambridge scientist, Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) invents a fabric that will not wear out – a benefit to the customer, but ruinous to both management and workforce. The Maggie documents an extraordinary battle for psychological, material and territorial supremacy between the crew of an old puffer, ‘The Maggie,’ and an American businessman Calvin B. Marshall (Paul Douglas), who has been tricked into entrusting the transport of his cargo to this leaky little boat. The Ladykillers is a bizarre tale of a gang of criminals who pose as musicians in an old lady’s house to plot an elaborate robbery.
The first thing to note about these films are the elements of innovation, by Ealing standards. The Ladykillers was the first Ealing comedy to be shot in colour, which is essential to the film’s surreal atmosphere and to what Derek Jarman described as its mood of “joie-de-vivre, that is quite rare in British cinema.” Whisky Galore! departs from Ealing tradition in that much of it was shot on location, inserting an element of documentary that Mackendrick essentially exploits as an inconoclastic joke. The evocation of the island community at the beginning – incongruously reverential considering the reprobate behaviour of the islanders later – is a delicious parody of Robert Flaherty’s classic Man of Aran (1933), a Mackendrick joke made all the more irreverent by the fact that Flaherty’s film happened to be one of Balcon’s own favourites. The islanders have but “few and simple pleasures,” intones the narrator, an observation illustrated by Mackendrick with a shot of a cottage as small child after small child after small child comes running out.
Innovation is actually the theme of The Man in the White Suit. One suspects a strong identification between the inventor Stratton and Mackendrick himself. Both are dedicated perfectionists who want to produce something permanent from their labours. Both have, in different ways, to accommodate their imaginative flights to an industrial structure and to the desire of businessmen who are encouraging up to a point but who basically want a return on their investment. The conflict between Stratton’s individualism and the capitalistic framework within which he must work could easily be taken as an allegory of the role of the film-maker. The fate of Stratton (his defeat and departure, yet his daring and defiance) could well be taken as an allegory of Mackendrick’s whole career, which might be the reason that it is his favourite amongst his films.
All of the comedies are constructed in the same way. Each begins with a leisurely exposition of community before the manic narrative is unleashed like a coiled spring and the situation hurtles into a quite frenzied chase. This might seem a conventional comic structure: what is unconventional is the direction in which these chases lead. For not one of these films ends happily, and there are unexpected twists and unresolved issues as irresistible self-interest meets immovable obstinacy.
It is this sub-text of ambivalence and argument that is the most characteristic feature of Mackendrick’s comedies. They are “problem” comedies. They deal with serious and complex issues and Mackendrick makes it very hard for us to choose the side with which we should sympathise.
Take Whisky Galore!. The theme is essentially the struggle between stuffy but correct legality and sympathetic but unbridled anarchy. Because the film is a comedy, it can indulge our delight in the islanders’ ingenious illegality, notably in that wonderful montage (a Mackendrick trademark) when they conceal their ill-gotten bottles from the eyes of government inspectors with an instinct bordering on genius – in a hot-water bottle, under a pie-crust, along the gutters. At the same time, there is a feeling that Captain Waggett has a point. “I found I really disapproved of the islanders for taking the whisky,” said the producer Monja Danischewsky. “No real moral sanction could be found for it.” Mackendrick would not go as far as that, but he has said that he found his sympathy growing for Captain Waggett, which “resulted in his becoming a more rounded character – an object of pity as well as fun.” Two things emerge from this. We are in an entirely different moral atmosphere from that of, say, Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), which is also a comedy of illegality but where there is never any doubt that the charming thieves will eventually be caught, that we will not be pained by their capture, and that the police will not be made to look too foolish. By contrast, at the end of Whisky Galore!, the islanders are not only left unpunished but Waggett is completely broken, an almost tragic figure. His humiliation is intensified still further when the docile Mrs Waggett (Catherine Lacey) suddenly explodes into laughter at the sight of her wilting husband, the impression being that her concealed condescension and even contempt for his rigid values can no longer be contained. (In parenthesis, one might note that laughter in Mackendrick is invariably sinister, like that extraordinary asthmatic cackle of Sir John in The Man in the White Suit as he realises that he has a business advantage; or the manic giggles of Professor Marcus towards the end of The Ladykillers as he talks about the invulnerability of Mrs Wilberforce.)
Or take The Man in the White Suit, which picks its way through similarly thorny issues with an alternately breezy and troubled air. The director’s sympathies are signalled with unusual clarity. Sidney is dressed in dashing white; the workers in neutral grey; the businessmen in funereal black. Sidney is the “knight in shining armour,” the workers the “flotsam floating on the floodtide of profit,” the businessmen the “dead hand of monopoly” (all these phrases are cited in the film). Yet the working out of the conflict between them is remarkably pessimistic, and one can under stand what the critic Raymond Durgnat means when he refers to the film’s “tragic radicalism.” Nowadays we are used to the equation between capitalism and prostitution from the films of Jean-Luc Godard: we do not expect to find it, however, in an Ealing comedy. But what else is one to make of that moment when the boss’s daughter is invited by the business men to save their economic souls by persuading Sidney to forget his invention through the strategy of sexual seduction? “What’s in it for me?” she asks. “I understand this work is comparatively well paid.” I cannot recall a harsher picture of industry in the British cinema and, as a film comedy about the morality of modern industrial society, The Man in the White Suit is every bit the equal of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958). Yet, in addition to showing the industrialists in the sleeziest possible light, Mackendrick also shows that they are irresistible: they win. Although the workers are shown more sympathetically and are antagonistic towards the bosses, they must finally forge an alliance with them in order to stop Sidney and save their jobs. “As so often, we need each other,” says Sir John, with barely concealed distaste, arranging a deal between Capital and Labour that has all the implications of management cunning and subterfuge that marks the similarly sinister alliance that concludes Lang’s Metropolis (1926). And caught in the middle is Sidney, an innocent, the tragic victim of vested interest. Like Waggett at the end of Whisky Galore!, his world is to collapse when his suit turns out not to be indestructible, his civilised defences are ripped from him, and he is the butt of scornful mocking laughter. What price Sidney’s inventive idealism in the complex world of commerce and consumerism?
Or take The Maggie. Again the themes with which it deals are serious ones, and the balance of sympathies is remarkably complicated. Through his experience at the hands of the crafty crew, the hustling American businessman, rather like Jack Lemmon’s finger-snapping American executive abroad in Wilder’s Avanti! (1972), is slowly humanised by the alternative tempo and culture of the local community. He participates in a Highland birthday celebration: he shares a sensitive scene with a local girl whose preference for a husband who will have time for her makes him aware of his failure of sensitivity in his own marriage. At the same time, his change of character can never entirely justify the extent of his humiliation and exploitation at the hands of those old Scottish rogues who are as exasperating as they are endearing. The savagery of the film gives an unsentimental force to the film’s investigation of contrasting cultures and values, and everything builds to an extraordinary moment when the American decides to sacrifice his cargo (symbolically, materialism) in order to save the boat (symbolically, tradition). It is typical of the peculiar ferocity of the film that, at this moment, Marshall turns to the skipper and, with the utmost logic and sincerity, utters one of the most remarkable lines of any screen comedy. “I want you to understand something – I’m serious,” Marshall says. “If you laugh at this, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
Laughter and killing are combined with some audacity in Mackendrick’s most famous film, The Ladykillers, in which his flair for merry malevolence and slapstick subversion is given full rein. A bunch of criminals posing as a crack string quintet with a penchant for Boccherini is a crazy enough concept, to begin with. As embodied by Alec Guinness (the brains, with long scarf and even longer teeth), Herbert Lom (a black-clad twitching psychopath), Cecil Parker (the mincing military man), Peter Sellers (a tetchy Teddy boy) and Danny Green (the brawn), British gangsterdom is taken to its extreme point of mad stylisation.
Nevertheless, its eccentricity is surpassed by the characterisation of the old lady, Mrs Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), with her parrot called General Gordon. Mrs Wilberforce occupies a bygone era of her own mind, and the gang’s name for her – ‘Mrs Lopsided’ – seems a description of her mental state as well as a reference to the subsidence of her house which tips everything at a crazy angle.
There are two main points about her. Firstly, like all of Mackendrick’s innocents, she is an unwitting agent of total destruction (innocence as a destructive force is a pervasive theme in his films). With the utmost sincerity, she invariably precipitates a gathering whirlwind of chaos, enveloping the law, Frankie Howerd’s fruit-seller at the market (“You mean to say you know her, and you let her run around loose?” he cries incredulously to a policeman), and ultimately ensnaring the gang itself. It is she who ought to be in danger and yet it is they who are helpless, circling in a kind of rueful dismay at their inability to pierce her dusty, decrepit rectitude. The second important thing about her is her age. She is not only Victoriana, tradition – as it were – in the flesh, in a film in which there is not a single speaking part for a woman under the age of seventy. She is anathema to everything young, a point startlingly demonstrated in the very first scene when she greets a baby in its pram and the outraged shrieks of the infant are so fierce that the pram actually shakes. It is this that makes the film so ambivalent. Mrs Wilberforce is such a withered agent of justice: in a way, she is the killer, and not the gang. One need not necessarily share Charles Barr’s delightful proposition that the gang symbolise the post-war Labour Government (they do justify the robbery to Mrs Wilberforce on the grounds of a redistribution of wealth) to appreciate the drift of his argument. The gang does certainly embody a kind of egalitarian vitality that unfortunately, exasperatedly, pulls itself to pieces in the face of Mrs Wilberforce’s castrating, implacably reactionary, quintessential Englishness. A theme of The Ladykillers – one could hardly claim that its topicality has diminished – is the mesmerising nanny complex of the British, and all that implies in terms of the continuing subservience to age, class and the values of the public school. When she learns of their robbery, she scolds the gang as if they had stolen a cake from the pantry and they hang their heads in shame. The Ladykillers is about the inability to escape from the clutches of Victorian values, with Mrs Wilberforce representing the kind of suffocating conservatism that leads many young men lightly to turn to thoughts of murder.
It is interesting to contemplate the distance between Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers. Whereas the early film breathed an air of vigorous realism, The Ladykillers has an altogether stranger, more fevered atmosphere. According to Michael Balcon, the idea came to the film’s splendid writer, William Rose (he also wrote the superb script for The Maggie) in a dream. The whole film could be interpreted as a dream. At the beginning, Mrs Wilberforce tells the police of her friend’s dream about being visited by strange invaders from another planet, at which point Mrs Wilberforce leaves as a thunderstorm rumbles in the distance. The final part of the film takes place during a thunderstorm while Mrs Wilberforce is asleep, and concludes with a return to the police station, almost as if she has not moved and instead stepped into her friend’s dream. Certainly the film’s weird ambience is quite unlike the stolid realism of much of Ealing’s usual film product.
Even more strikingly, the films are worlds apart in mood. The anarchic atmosphere of Whisky Galore! has, by the time of The Ladykillers, faded into a world of impregnable conservatism that reduces opponents to rags of inanition. The stiff values of Captain Waggett in Whisky Galore! and Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers are not dissimilar, but their fates are very different – from humiliation to triumph. Hard not to think that the films are reflecting the fluctuations of a national mood. Michael Balcon has said that Ealing directors tended to be middle-class liberals who had voted Labour for the first time in 1945 and were fired with the idea of a fresh, dynamic, more equal, less class-ridden society. With the return of the Tories to power in the early Fifties (a street painting of Winston Churchill is prominent as Mrs Wilberforce passes the police station on both occasions), the atmosphere has changed, and The Ladykillers becomes a valediction on the failure of Ealing liberalism.
In looking at the themes of Mackendrick’s films, I should not forget the visual craftsmanship that brings the material so vividly to life. Mackendrick has a complete technical mastery of a wide variety of styles – from Flaherty documentary (Whisky Galore!) to Eisensteinian montage (The Man in the White Suit) to genre parody (The Ladykillers). He has a very quick visual wit. In The Maggie a demand to see the magistrate by Marshall’s clerk, Pusey (Hugh Burden) when he is being imprisoned for poaching, is met with the rejoinder that the magistrate is the person he pushed into the canal: Mackendrick responds with a crisp peep-hole shot which instantly cuts the crestfallen Pusey down to size. The first shot of Sir John in The Man in the White Suit resembles something out of Nosferatu: a face in complete shadow at the back of a limousine, with only his hands visible – the “dead hands of monopoly” brilliantly crystallised. The low-angle shots of The Ladykillers are not Mackendrick’s attempts at artiness, but comically render the cock-eyed slippage of Mrs Wilberforce’s living quarters. That film’s visual combination of humour and suspense is worthy of Hitchcock. A close medium-shot of the crooks, as they collaborate in a wildly improbable story to the old lady of the troubles that compelled them to steal, is suddenly modified when a surly, black-clad Louis (Herbert Lom) noses his way into the back of the frame, and the possible consequences for Mrs Wilberforce if she does not believe what she is told are chillingly brought home. The film’s hilarious and exciting final escapades on a railway siding, as the gang eliminate one another, is plotted by Mackendrick with mathematical visual precision. Charles Barr has called Mackendrick’s films “intricate networks of failed communications,” and the clunk of a railway signal that fells the single surviving member of the gang is surely the ultimate Mackendrick black joke about the penalty that can befall a person who ignores or misreads signals or signs, inanimate or human.
Which, incidentally, is the theme of Mandy (1953), the single Ealing film of Mackendrick’s that is not a comedy, but deals with the situation of a deaf and dumb child. As the child’s powers of communication improve through the film, those of the adults diminish, the husband suspecting his wife of adultery (shots of the back of his head suggest uncomprehending deafness in precisely the same way as similar shots of Mandy), and rejecting the skills of the special school which, as his wife says, he visited but did not really see. Mandy’s deafness and dumbness are merely a symptom of people’s broader failures of perception and communication, and her initial isolation a metaphor for the traps adults often create for themselves in their reluctance and inability to break out of their own private prejudices and recognise other people’s worlds. The montages of learning are infinitely assured – the unselfish dedication of the teachers counter pointed with the self-interest of parents, private-eyes and politicians – and the overall emotional effect is as powerful as in Arthur Penn’s more celebrated powerhouse drama on a similar theme, The Miracle Worker (1962).
After The Ladykillers, Mackendrick left Ealing and made four films over a period of thirteen years, failing to initiate or complete at least another four, before retiring in 1968. On both The Devil’s Disciple and The Guns of Navarone he was replaced by men (Guy Hamilton and J. Lee Thompson, respectively) with greater working speed if considerably less talent. His projected film with Tony Hancock (a version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros) was shelved, largely by all accounts through Hancock’s impatience with the slow progress of the film. Another projected assignment, Mary Queen of Scots, starring Mia Farrow, was eventually made with a different actress (Vanessa Redgrave) and a different director (Charles Jarrott).
The four films he did complete, however, were very fine: it might be worth saying that Mackendrick is the single Ealing director who continued to make fine films outside of Ealing. His New York film, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), might be subtitled witchhunt galore. Its portrait of press machinations gives ample scope for Mackendrick’s racy cynicism. Tony Curtis (in the performance of his career) is the kind of cunning chiseller one recognises from earlier Mackendrick films without any compensating charm, and the location photography is electrifyingly authentic. Sammy Going South (1962) confirms Mackendrick as one of the great directors of children. They seem to give him their complete trust and, through them, he explores his ambivalent feelings towards innocence and instinct, behaviour instigated by innate feeling rather than by social convention. Mackendrick’s extraordinary sensitivity to the world of children makes one think, by way of comparison, of Lewis Carroll, of Henry James. Innocence and puritanism operate in a similarly tense and threatening atmosphere.
His film of Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica (1964) is a triumph, having all the qualities one associates with Mackendrick: the alert depiction of the children’s world, the scepticism at English values that seem to represent the suppression of natural instincts, an element of play that is to get out of control and lead to games of death. The failures of communication come to a head at the trial of the pirates, where the girl’s ingenuous and, as she thinks, innocuous testimony inadvertently puts a noose around the Captain’s neck. “But we’re innocent!” exclaims his First Mate, to which the Captain replies, with a painful laugh that is so typical of Mackendrick: “You must be guilty of something.” The ending is again characteristically open, a dying fall: the girl watched by her uncomprehending parents herself watching a toy boat sailing across the lake, perhaps permanently traumatised by the memory or the adult whose death she caused (like Leo at the end of The Go-Between). Don’t Make Waves (1957) is a hectic comedy about a swimming-pool salesman in the slide area or Los Angeles, where houses slip into the ocean “like a ship sinking” (sinking ships recur a lot in Mackendrick: even Mrs Wilberforce’s husband died in one). Andrew Sarris called it “a frightening documentary on the state of California,” in which, as is the way in Mackendrick’s work, ostensibly solid constructions suddenly disintegrate and the ground – life itself – gives way beneath your feet.
It is fascinating to try and locate Mackendrick’s place in the British cinema. Something of his legacy can be seen in the films of Jack Clayton (The Innocents, Our Mother’s House) and Lionel Jeffries (The Amazing Mr Blunden, Baxter), which are rather like Mackendrick’s in their handling of disturbed children, though more sentimental, less rigorously intelligent. His spiky Scottish humour has often been alluded to in comparisons with recent films of Bill Forsyth. Local Hero (1983) is thematically almost identical to The Maggie (the conflict between American entrepreneurism and sly Scottish community politics), but it seems sluggish in pacing beside the compact percussiveness of Mackendrick’s piece, and the darker implications, unlike in The Maggie, never come forcefully enough to the surface. Forsyth’s most recent film, Comfort and Joy (1984) has a mock-serious theme worthy of Mackendrick: if people get so violent over ice-cream, what hope is there for the world? But Forsyth (literally) fritters away the idea into something soft-centred at the finale which is quite unlike the toughness and haunting resonance of a Mackendrick denouement. Nevertheless, Forsyth is the nearest Mackendrick duplicate we have at the moment: he should not be indulged (this is a warning to critics) but he should be cherished.
Mackendrick’s place perhaps is with the mavericks of the British cinema. He belongs somewhere between fastidious aesthetes like Humphrey Jennings, Thorold Dickinson, Jack Clayton (a fastidiousness that finally resulted in near-total inactivity) and the mad poets, like Michael Powell, Nicolas Roeg, Derek Jarman, John Boorman, who still preserve in their work an unexpected sense of provocation and play. I suppose the main fault of his films is one that has often been remarked of Ealing films: a certain reticence about sex, though, in Mackendrick, this is not so much timidity as abstinence. What energies his characters have are channelled (sublimated?) into everything but sexuality: there is scarcely a conventional romantic relationship prominent in any one of his films. His greatest gift to the cinema, I think, is the quality of his intelligence, the thoroughness with which he reveals, even in slapstick comedy, the enigmas of human behaviour and motive.
What I cherish most in his films are those hilarious pin-pricks of the blackest humour, which jump out at you quite unexpectedly from the context. Like that moment at the end of The Maggie, when Marshall, visibly drained and exhausted after his tortured time with the crew, is about to leave, and the Mate suddenly pipes up with genuine warmth: “If you ever want another job done…” Or there is that moment in The Ladykillers, when Peter Sellers is being chased by Danny Green who mistakenly thinks that the former has killed the old lady. Mackendrick’s slyness of style and the complete originality of his comic tone is somehow encapsulated by Sellers’s last line to his assailant as he is on the point of being murdered: “Where’s your sense of humour?” he asks.
From Essays in Honour of Peter Davidson (1985)
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© Neil Sinyard
