Once More With Ealing
Colin Waters
Sunday Herald, 20 June 1994
Long lauded as the most inventive and original film-makers working in American movies, Joel and Ethan Coen – the writing/directing team behind critical hits Miller’s Crossing and Fargo – recently surprised their many admirers by helming a remake. And while their new version of The Ladykillers – a peculiarly British comedy from 1955 – has neutered the original’s jet-black comedy, it does make explicit the debt the brothers owe Alexander Mackendrick, arguably Scotland’s greatest film director.
Over a six-year period, Sandy Mackendrick was responsible for the best films to emerge from the famous Ealing film studio, helping cement its reputation around the world. From his 1949 debut, Whisky Galore!, to The Man In The White Suit in 1951, and finally 1955’s The Ladykillers (the ailing Ealing’s last hurrah), a Mackendrick film was marked by its economy of storytelling and barbed humour. Unlike most film-makers, his influence extends beyond his oeuvre. For the past twenty years of his life, he taught film at CalArts (California Institute Of Arts) tutoring, amongst others, James Mangold, director of Copland and a forthcoming Johnny Cash biopic.
Mackendrick was born in 1912 in Boston, his Scottish parents having moved to the United States the year before. In 1919, young Mackendrick was sent to Glasgow where his grandfather brought him up after his father died in the flu epidemic that swept the world following the great war. A student of Hillhead High School and briefly Glasgow School of Art, Mackendrick left Scotland to work for an advertising agency in London.
“He didn’t have a strong accent but he considered himself Scottish,” says Hilary Mackendrick, his wife of more than forty years. “He missed the pubs when we moved to America.”
In 1946, Mackendrick was employed by Ealing Studios as a scriptwriter and production designer. Whisky Galore!, an adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s novel set in the Hebrides, was Mackendrick’s first job as a director. A moderate success in Britain, its runaway popularity with American and French audiences launched Mackendrick’s career.
As part of his course at CalArts, Mackendrick taught Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, a first world war prisoner-of-war drama in which representatives of the French class system unite against a common enemy, the Germans. In Mackendrick’s second film, The Man In The White Suit, the British classes unite too but, less romantically, to destroy the inventor (played by Alec Guinness) of an indestructible fabric that threatens their interests. The climax, in which a lynch mob advances upon Guinness, shreds Ealing’s twee image. The film tells you everything you ever need to know about why class war will never succeed in Britain.
Of his other Ealing films, Mandy (1952) was a drama about a deaf child and The Maggie (1954), set in Scotland, anticipated Local Hero. It was also, according to his widow, the film of which he was fondest. But the greatest triumph of his British period remains The Ladykillers. It’s a heist movie in which Mrs Wilberforce, a doddering relic of Victorian England, unwittingly destroys a gang of murderous thieves, again led by Alec Guinness, posing as her lodgers. Mr Wilberforce is the archetypal Mackendrick character, a sort of Typhoid Mary spreading calamity without being touched by it herself.
Ealing dissolved soon after the release of The Ladykillers. Without a studio, Mackendrick’s career entered a period of instability that would last until his retirement in 1969. In that time he had yo-yo’ed between London and Hollywood, directing projects he was never entirely satisfied with. A High Wind In Jamaica (1965) has its admirers, though perhaps the most interesting thing about it today is that it marks the sole acting appearance of novelist Martin Amis. Mackendrick was sacked after a few days of directing The Guns Of Navarone. His long cherished Mary, Queen Of Scots biopic fell through. After the disaster of 1967’s Don’t Make Waves – a beach movie that everyone involved, from Mackendrick to its star Tony Curtis, to The Byrds who provided the theme, thought it their worst work – the director retired.
The exception to his post-Ealing misery was Sweet Smell of Success in 1957. Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster gave career-best performances as the nervy publicist and ruthless columnist locked into a spiral of corruption. Like Vertigo and It’s A Wonderful Life, the film failed at the box office only to be rediscovered later.
“It took a while for people to catch up,” Hilary says. “Part of the problem of its reception was that cinemagoers were used to Burt Lancaster playing heroic action roles and weren’t prepared for his villainous character. Sandy would have been surprised at the time if you had told him fifty years later people would still be talking about Sweet Smell of Success. Films then were thought of as journalism; you watch them one week, and then throw them away when another arrives.”
As his career in direction closed, a new one in teaching began at CalArts. By all accounts, Mackendrick revelled in the new role. Paul Cronin is the editor of On Film-Making, a new book that collects the unusually literate notes Mackendrick wrote for classes, and is making a documentary to be shown at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Cronin says: “He was a great teacher who the students loved and respected, but they feared him too. When Mackendrick was asked what he thought his role as a teacher was, he replied, ‘When I first started I thought my role was to teach people the basics of film-making. Now I feel it’s my job to get as many people as possible to quit the business because they clog it up for those who are talented.’ He was brutal that way.”
Mackendrick taught at CaIArts until two weeks before his death in 1993. The remakes, the book, his pupils, and of course the films ensure his legacy survives. His wife Hilary is to unveil a memorial plaque at his former Chelsea home. And Martin Scorsese, who wrote On Film-Making’s foreword, is making a documentary on the British directors he admires, which includes a section on Mackendrick. Eleven years after his death, 2004 looks like being the year of Alexander Mackendrick.
© Colin Waters/Sunday Herald
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