This American Mastered British Humor
Nora Sayre
The New York Times, 6 January 1985
Evelyn Waugh was partial to the word flummox, meaning to confuse or bewilder; the verb befits the action in the British comedy of the late 1940′s and early 50′s, where authority figures were confounded and then manipulated by those whom they sought to control. The impotence of authority was a persistent theme in the post-war satires made at London’s Ealing Studios. Emerging from the sense of oppression imposed by wartime austerity, rationing, and the disciplines necessary to winning a war, British audiences welcomed Ealing’s small ballads of rebellion, and many were extremely popular here. While critics and historians frequently referred to the ‘anarchy’ that permeates such movies as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, the films are hardly insurrectionary. Instead, they convey the delights of challenging the boss and out-foxing his functionaries.
Some of the wittiest and most inventive Ealing comedies were directed by Alexander Mackendrick, who was born in Boston of Scottish parents, educated in Glasgow and has worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Often praised for his evocations of the British character – a major concern of producer Michael Balcon’s – he also directed that most pungent of Broadway movies, Sweet Smell of Success. Two of his classics were The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers. Whisky Galore! was the first feature film directed by Mr. Mackendrick. The movie focuses on a ship with a cargo of whisky that was wrecked near an island in the Outer Hebrides in 1943, when rationing had deprived the islanders of all spirits. Pitting their intelligence against a stumble-witted English captain (Basil Radford) who is determined to prevent the looting of the ship, the exuberant Scots foil the forces of the law.
In this tiny community, where each inhabitant knows his neighbor’s business and the one telephone operator recognizes everyone’s voice, the law-giver is helpless against the native talents for collaboration: we see shots of hands rapidly hiding bottles of whisky in drawers, stoves, a cash register, beneath a baby in a basinette, in roof gutters and rain barrels. Much of the charm of the adult delinquents springs from the swiftness of their thinking: if one scheme collapses, another instantly replaces it. The texture of the movie heightens its hilarity: the documentary narration and the glimpses of stoic figures in black backed by cumulus clouds, or closeups of somber, craggy faces, parody the visual mannerisms of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran.
Some of the other Ealing comedies were criticized in Britain for quaintness and coziness. But the charges can’t be leveled against Mr. Mackendrick’s work, which contains darker vibrations than many of the Ealing romps. In The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guinness plays a youthful genius who invents an indestructible fiber; the textile executives are horrified by the prospect of a product that will ruin their entire industry, and the factory workers face the elimination of their jobs. The naive scientist, obsessed only with perfecting his creation, ignores all its consequences while the businessmen and laborers unite in conspiring to suppress it. Consternation is a specialty of Mr Mackendrick: again, impulsive plotting and desperate remedies are essential to his comedies. Lines like “This is insanity!” echo through board rooms where the voices of gentlemen are not supposed to rise. Panic ensues when test tubes gurgle mysteriously or when someone escapes from a locked room, and dignity is abandoned by those whose essence is composure.
Now 72, and a fellow of the school of film at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches, Mr. Mackendrick recently shared some of his memories of Ealing. The director explained an interior joke of The Man in the White Suit: all the main personae in the film were caricatures of the staff at Ealing. The high-strung industrialist was Michael Balcon: Cecil Parker played him with the propriety of a controlled hysteric. (The scriptwriters worried that he might recognize some of his own phrases, but he didn’t.) The ancient asthmatic executive (Ernest Thesiger) was inspired by the musical director of the studio; the shop steward was based on Sidney Cole, the associate producer; the nurse summoned to sedate the scientist was actually the nurse at Ealing. Alec Guinness drew on “the impervious innocence” of the very young publicity photographer of the unit: the actor watched the effect that he had on his colleagues. Mr. Mackendrick remarked that Mr. Guinness has long been “a fantastic observer of others,” paying attention to their voices, and that “he has the habit” of employing “the idiosyncracies of people he knows.” (In Mr. Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers a prototype was the critic Kenneth Tynan, whose style of smoking, long scarf, protruding teeth, and wispy hair enhanced the portrait of a caustic criminal – which was also influenced by the director’s life-long fascination with Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse.) Still, the Guinness approach was far from literal; Mr. Mackendrick said that the personal details provided “early starting points for a developing characterization that soon shed its origins. ”
Today, The Man in the White Suit still seems to be one of Mr. Guinness’s richest roles. As the scientist, he ranges from passive timidity to total recklessness; the manner is modest – when he’s not utterly arrogant. When the businessmen try to bribe him, Mr. Guinness’s sublime impassivity distills the power that this man has over others – simply because he doesn’t care about money: he can make them lose millions because personal wealth has no attraction for him. (Since capitalism is satirized, some left-wing members of the studio thought they saw certain Marxist patterns in the movie, but radicals are mocked as well. Mr. Mackendrick, who has “no political commitment,” volunteered that he “delights in political irony.”)
Mr. Mackendrick stressed that the scientist – who’s blind to all human feeling – wasn’t meant to be a sympathetic person; however, Mr. Guinness gave him a dimension that made spectators identify with him. Pondering his interest in “destructive innocents” – which had not been a conscious theme in his work – the director acknowledged that such beings have recurred in almost all of his movies, from the blundering English captain in Whisky Galore! to the children in High Wind in Jamaica and the small boy in Sammy Going South. As these characters remain absorbed in their own pursuits, disaster for others follows in their wake: they resemble bad drivers who never have accidents – while other cars collide and crash behind them. But they’re completely unaware of the havoc they create, and their placidity is a key to comedy.
Yet the innocents can eventually suffer, as the captain does when his plans to rescue the whisky backfire, as the scientist does when his miraculous fabric disintegrates. In each case, they must endure the enormous laughter of others. Laughter at defeat is central to both movies. Reflecting that analyses of comedy are usually attempted by those who have no sense of humor, Mr. Mackendrick said, “There’s a moment toward the end of certain kinds of comedies when they ought to get a little nasty.” Paraphrasing Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter – “the only book on humor by a man who knew how to be funny” – the director added that comedy requires “a sense of playfulness and then its opposite. which can be malicious or desperate,” or disturbing. “And there’s a third element: after the disappointment or shock, there’s an unexpected reward which redeems all previous disappointment. The only things I could make jokes about are much too close to the bone, subjects that would be unbearable on a solemn level.”
The script of The Ladykillers grew out of a dream of the screenwriter William Rose, and the movie – which depicts the efforts of five criminals to murder an old woman – has the form of a fable. The criminals’ potential victim is another destructive innocent; played by Katie Johnson when she was 77, the imperturbable Victorian was conceived as “a comically diminished, pint-sized figure of Britannia.” Mr. Mackendrick, who has “always been addicted to myth and fable,” thought of the British raj when he was making the film: the photograph of the widow’s husband who went down with his ship is an image for the lost Empire.
Ignorant that she’s in danger from the men who pretend to be musicians, the widow amiably but unwittingly frustrates their schemes until Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers and Danny Green are driven to mutual betrayal. In Mr. Guinness’s scenes, there are some wonderful contrasts of behavior and utterance: in a frenzy, he instructs others to be calm. Mr. Lom, the most sinister of the quintet, was extolled by Mr. Mackendrick for performing as though he didn’t know that he was comic – a tactic that the director considers crucial to farce.
In each of Mr. Mackendrick’s comedies, there are moments when few trust the sanity of others; madness may not be contagious, but everyone’s infected with reciprocal suspicion. At times, the canvas is quite broad, but the details are very subtle; Mr. Mackendrick is a master of implication. When people can’t believe what they see or hear – or do not want to accept it – doubt is best expressed with delicacy. The element of disbelief was deliciously refined by Joan Greenwood. In Whisky Galore! she’s the graceful switchboard operator whose subcontralto quivers with skepticism when ordered to place a vital call: “Top what? Top priority?” In The Man in the White Suit, she’s a silken sophisticate who tests her powers of seduction. Ironic inflections flavor her delivery: when she says “You may not believe me, but I want what’s best for you,” it seems as if no one could pronounce such a line with more elegant insincerity. And when lunacy surrounds her, the crooning voice deepens further in astonishment while the eyebrows rise very slightly.
Ealing developed a repertory troupe that reunited performers like Miss Greenwood, Mr. Guinness and Mr. Parker in diverse roles. The Ladykillers was the studio’s last successful comedy, and the demise of Ealing represented only one of the periodic collapses of the British film industry. But the talents assembled by Michael Balcon were not hampered by the orthodoxies that ruled much ot the post-War British and American movie business. In particular, Mr. Mackendrick’s characters – whether dispensing misinformation, dancing reels, tracking a miscreant or fleeing from the police – seem like figures in a liberated zone, where comedy is illumined by contradiction.
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© Nora Sayre/The New York Times
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