Whisky Galore!
Whisky Galore!
From From Limelight to Satellite (BFI, 1991)
As film theories ebb and flow like the Solway, the stabilising fact remains: great films have great hands on the tiller, with great crews around them. How are we to explain otherwise when such all times favourites as Casablanca or Whisky Galore! were wrought out of such production despair. But if the turmoil of Casablanca was so confusing that the production team shot two endings, how are we to consider Whisky Galore! which stumbled back to Ealing with no ending at all? Or at least there was none apparent to Ealing’s studio chief Michael Balcon, who advised chopping down what had then been assembled into a sixty minute second feature.
PDF here. Here for a recent article about the film from The Independent on Sunday. Here for a review of the film from The New York Times. Here for a review from Monthly Film Bulletin. Here for an academic thesis about film’s themes.
