No Illusions

The New Yorker, 31 January 1994

The death of Alexander Mackendrick, at the end of last year, did not receive the attention it deserved, Maybe this is no surprise; he hadn’t directed a film since 1967. But without him the landscape of cinema has grown dimmer, a little more barren of wit. Remember Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers, with his trailing scarf and maddened hair, a vampire long in the tooth; remember Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, barking at Tony Curtis, “You sound happy, Sidney. Why should you be happy when I’m not?” Remember moments like these, and you are thinking of Mackendrick.

He was born in Boston, in 1912, to immigrant Scottish parents, and returned to Glasgow at the age of six. As a young man, he went to art school and then to London, bringing his design skills to the advertising firm of J. Walter Thompson. During the Second World War, he joined an Allied propaganda outfit that took him from Africa to the newly liberated Rome, where he filmed, among other things, the exhumation of massacred partisans and Jews. Years later, in a television interview, he described the scene: “A workman was handling a corpse, and the head fell off and rolled away. He reached round and got hold of the wrong head, and was putting it back with the torso. And I found myself screaming with rage at him – then realised the terrible slapstick humour of it, and I and the unit broke into paroxysms of laughter.” By any standard, this was a little darker than chocolate commercials, and it takes us straight to the heart of Mackendrick’s concerns – to the clear, unsqueamish focus of his mind’s eye. There are no rotting heads in his films, though it would have been interesting to see him turn his hand to horror, but the world that he spins for us has two sides – the bright and the bitter – and it never comes to rest. Where there is danger, or the shadow of death, he nudges it toward a joke; and where there is comedy he rims it in black.

Lady Prod-2

This may be too grand a claim for his debut feature, Whisky Galore!, but it’s easy to forget the sharp edges that Mackendrick carved in a piece of whimsy. The plot, adapted from a Compton Mackenzie novel, tells of a cargo of whiskey shipwrecked off the coast of an island; the locals plunder it before the ship goes down, and spend the rest of the film hiding the loot from marauding revenue men. The tale sounds too innocent for its own good, but that is precisely what engages Mackendrick’s curiosity: for him innocence is not so much a state of grace as a starting gun, liable to set off all kinds of chaos. Just look at Mrs. Wilberforce, in The Ladykillers, the old dear who wouldn’t hurt a fly but who sends a handful of crooks to their deaths without even trying. Mackendrick was himself a man of high principles, but he had the moral imagination to see where they could lead; when the meek look like inheriting the earth, you want to stay clear.

One of the prime requirements of pastoral – and Whisky Galore! is a kind of pastoral, heavily laced with liquor – is that it should amble along with no sense of rush. But Mackendrick made it plain from the start of his career that movies were not made to hang around; none of his best work runs over a hundred minutes. Recalling Whisky Galore!, you find your memory studded with a set of images that could come from a gangster picture: figures in long coats striding through the night, the grille of a speeding black car shot from the level of the roadway, the murderous look of men denied their drink. Nobody gets hurt, of course, and none of this lunacy matters, but Mackendrick’s style pretends that it does – a flattering, suggestive joke that keeps the movie alight. It is one of the most efficient idylls in cinema; no wonder it was such a hit in New York (far more so than in London), despite being given the unfortunate title of Tight Little Island, which made it sound like alfresco porn. Audiences who remembered Prohibition, and the movies bred from it, could only warm to a sequence in which contraband bottles were stashed in drains, hidden in pies, and tucked under a baby in its crib.

Whisky Galore! is the first of five pictures that Mackendrick made for Ealing Studios, the others being The Man in the White Suit, Crash of Silence, High and Dry and The Ladykillers. Time has not been kind to Ealing and its productions, and with good reason; like most British movies, they feel like handy social documents rather than adventures in style. The left admires their civic solidarity and soft twinges of subversion, the right buys into their vision of an England run on deferential charm. This tiresome squabbling is fine for such tepid works as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, but it unfair to a man like Mackendrick, whose films repel all political intruders and snap at complacency wherever they find it. The Man in the White Suit, in which a young scientist (Alec Guinness) invents a fabric that never wears our, is careful to spot folly on every side: the unions fear for their jobs, the bosses for their profits, and nobody thinks of the public benefit. Put like that, the film sounds like a morality tale, a plea for balanced industrial relations, whereas the effect of watching it is actually to throw you off balance, and pull you into a bad dream. At one point, Guinncss – calm, upright, clinging like a spider to his unbreakable thread – walks backward down a wall. Later, at the climax, he is chased and encircled by a mob, which tears the luminous creation from his body as if plucking feathers off a chicken.

“A man of great charm but of astonished outrage at the wickedness of the world” – that is how Guinness summed up Mackendrick in the foreword to “Lethal Innocence,” Philip Kemp’s 1991 study of the director. The description fits the movies as well as the man, hinting at his peculiar courage – the courage of the artist who sets out to confront what appals him. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, Mackendrick was lured to America, and after a few false starts he ended up in New York, making Sweet Smell of Success. It has become a proper classic – not the kind that we look back on in fond remembrance but the kind that presses its claim upon us more urgently with every year. If the story of the columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and the press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) had teeth in the days of Walter Winchell, just feel the force of its bite now; imagine the ride the two of them would take down the information superhighway. The plot of the movie is simple enough until you try to tell it, and then you get fouled up. Mackendrick and his screen writers, Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, throw a net of corruption over the whole city, so that you can’t work out what’s important: the quips of a cigarette girl sound like clues to a big mystery, but suicide barely rates as gossip.

If he wanted to be outraged by the wickedness of the world, Mackendrick had come to the right place. But he arranged the city to his own satisfaction, as if to prove that a hellhole could lure the best of men if it looked good enough. The cameraman, James Wong Howe, washed the night-club walls with oil to make them shine, to match the gleam of the wet streets outside and provide a mirrored haven for vain souls. Woody Allen’s Manhattan made the island so beautiful that the only way to live up to it was to fall in love – it was the least you could do. Mackendrick came from the other direction: he wanted to know the most you could do and still get away with it. Hunsecker is the high priest of this unholy practice, his declaration of faith provoked by the sight of a sidewalk scuffle; turning away with a granite smile, he says, “I love this dirty town.” Somewhere behind that line you catch the luscious tones of Joan Greenwood in The Man in the White Suit, purring with ambition: “I want to see something of the world beyond this dirty little town.” Wherever you go, life is made up of dirty towns; whether you love or hate them is neither here nor there.

Sweet Smell of Success is a formidable achievement, and it leads one to the disquieting conclusion that America made Mackendrick a serious artist. He himself would have disputed this, being no great fan of the film, yet it rings out far beyond the sleaze of Broadway, with an effortless resonance that mocks even the best of his other productions. If you watch The Ladykillers, you see the workings of a neat comic mechanism, and you laugh at people like Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom. But they are essentially putting on comic turns, the flourishes of expert stagecraft that British cinema has so often mistaken for screen acting, and the movie is happy to support them. On the other hand, when Tony Curtis plays Falco he joins the swim of the movie; he hustles it along, not just feeding off the camera’s nervous energy but inspiring some of its best moves – the driven, on-your-toes quality that tells of hunger never satisfied. Ever since Whisky Galore! Mackendrick had been inching toward film noir; now he was in the thick of it, up to his neck in fear and loathing. The result put him up there with Hitchcock and Fritz Lang – the great talents touched into genius by America, by the exhilarating discovery that a high style does not push the world away from us but draws it ever closer. If only for one film, he caught the sweet smell of excess.

Whisky 4

And that was that. The soaring career never took off, although there is much to be enjoyed in the breeziness of A High Wind in Jamaica” One of the children caught by pirates in that movie was played, somewhat surprisingly, by Martin Amis, then aged fourteen. The novelist now recalls Mackendrick’s “mild hysteria combined with full integrity.” It sounds like a volatile mixture, superbly unsuited to the movie industry. Projects came up for grabs but dropped away, including an adaptation of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, from which Mackendrick was sacked after two weeks. “A very brilliant man,” said Burt Lancaster, whose company was producing the picture. “But we hadn’t the time or the money for him. That’s the truth.” In the end, Mackendrick quit the game and became dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts, where by all accounts he was an exceptional (and demanding) teacher. He died in Los Angeles, an exile of sorts, although where he was exiled from it is hard to say. A Scot far too skeptical for the cuteness of Ealing but not ferocious enough for Hollywood, a director who tethered his work to particular places, from Times Square to the Outer Hebrides, but peered at them with the gaze of an outsider: Alexander Mackendrick never really belonged anywhere. Like his fellow-ironist Billy Wilder, he was under no illusions, and his movies show people dragged to the point of collapse by injustice and bad luck. Unlike Wilder, however, he still thought it possible – a mark of civilization, in fact – to live in hope.

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