A Generous Hand

Stephen Mills

Times Literary Supplement, 14 January 2005

I still remember my first lesson in film with Sandy Mackendrick. He had asked two student actors from the theatre department to improvise a conflict. The issue between them was banal – the boy had driven the girl’s car without permission and with insufficient oil in the engine – but their performance was electrifying, unforgettable. Out of thin air they hammered hot sheets of anger. Instead of being intimidated by the famous film director, they were liberated by his attention.

‘Sandy’ – Alexander – Mackendrick directed nine major features. These included several that have since become cult films: the near-perfect The Ladykillers (1955), the quirky and original The Man in the White Suit (1951), both drawing superb performances from Alec Guinness, and the startling, cynical-before-its-time Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which the Hollywood heart-throbs Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are both deeply unpleasant. Sandy respected actors, claiming that he learned far more from them than they ever learned from him. The main job of the director, he maintained, is to give the actor his absolute attention, because a fine performance is always tuned to feedback. When asked how you get an actor to do what you want he replied, “You don’t. What you do is try to get the actor to want what you need”. He spoke of them as the director’s “chief collaborators.” Indeed, he recognized that the whole process of film-making is a joint effort, illustrating this with a neat anecdote. A friend once told him that he had met someone who said “Sandy Mackendrick? I know him. He worked on two of my films.” It turned out the speaker had been a stand-by carpenter on his sets. And Sandy’s reaction? He was “a first-class carpenter because he knew the films were his as much as anyone else’s.”

In 1969, twenty years after his first big film, Whisky Galore!, a cherished Hollywood project on Mary Queen of Scots collapsed and Sandy began a new life. He became Dean of the Film School at the California Institute of the Arts. Alexander Mackendrick’s book On Film-Making, seamlessly edited by Paul Cronin, is a compilation of the teaching notes Sandy accrued over the next twenty-four years before his death in 1993. The result is a profound book about the process of directing. It is enriched by countless revealing anecdotes from his own films. For instance, the whole plot of The Ladykillers sprang fully formed as a dream from the writer Bill Rose’s head and was told as a funny story around the Ealing studios for weeks before Sandy realized it could be a film. It then transmogrified, equally subconsciously, into a metaphor for the state of post-war Britain: “The tiny figure of Mrs Wilberforce… is plainly a much-diminished Britannia. Her house is in a cul-de- sac. Shabby and cluttered with memories of the days when Britain’s navy ruled the world and captains gallantly stayed on the bridge as their ships went down, her house is structurally unsound. Dwarfed by the grim landscape of railway yards and screaming express trains, it is Edwardian England, an anachronism in the contemporary world… that might, against all logic, survive its enemies.”

M-POSTER The book benefits enormously from the fact that Sandy structured his thoughts to make them palatable to unruly students. CalArts was new, avant-garde and the only degree-awarding institution in the United States concentrating solely on the ’5 arts’ – theatre, music, dance, graphic art and film/video. Somewhat incongruously, this inferno was funded by Walt Disney, and amid its hairy, wild-eyed students there was a small cadre of talented animators who were fast-tracked to the Disney studios. Sandy arrived at a time of widespread student riots and a fierce disrespect for authority. Even a decade later, the school was still extreme. At our graduation ceremony in 1980, several girls took their degrees stark naked, one approaching the podium on a tightrope, another leading a leopard on a string. The college Resident was spattered with ‘blood’ from a fake hand, luridly chopped off by its owner while he was shaking it. The unfortunate dignitary was then offered sanctuary in a hot air balloon which took off, losing him to the rest of the celebrations and marooning him for hours in the Mojave Desert.

It was not an easy place to be a teacher, but no one ever made fun of Sandy Mackendrick. For film schools were scarce and were still supplying the industry with apprenticed talent – and Sandy had professional wisdom to impart. His teaching notes were gold dust. I still have my copies. He had been a graphic designer before Ealing and his pictorial analyses of key sequences from great films – On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt – were delightful as well as revelatory. Many of them are reproduced here. He argued that every film begins and ends “in the mind” of a single viewer. He humorously portrayed this concept as a winged head – what he called “the invisible witness” – that could travel anywhere it needed to be on the set. This freed him from being tied too literally to stale camera moves and positions, guided as he was by what the invisible witness needed to see. The imagined audience was a “co-conspirator.” “Direction,” he said, “is a matter of emphasis… What a film-director really directs is his audience’s attention.”

Maggie 10 Buried in these lessons are the bones of a dialectic between structure and free form. This argument may largely have exhausted itself now. Most films released in cinemas anywhere in the world avoid experimentation while today’s mushroom film schools seem to be absorbed by conceptual theories that have little or no practical application. The industry and what were once its training grounds have grown far apart. This was not the case thirty years ago, when disputes about form and grammar had a certain potency. Sandy’s students thought good films had to break rules. He suggested you needed to know what they were before you broke them. For him, film-making was the “craft of story-telling” in pictures, which is not only “un-modemist. It’s old. Ancient in fact.” He referred to “the pre-verbal language of cinema,” by which he meant not a primitive code that predates speech, but an intricate visual one that exists before an idea is expressed in words. The stories themselves are often simple: “who does what with whom to whom and why.” But what is unique about cinema, he explained, was that the camera can “photograph thought.” Above all, therefore, a director must elicit thoughts from his actors. For the finest performers have an infinite vocabulary of eloquent fleeting glances, a quality that cannot be expected to transfer to the hyperbolic context of the stage. This is why he encouraged his pupils never to say “action” and “cut” too soon. All sorts of tiny mysteries can occur on the faces of the actors before a scene begins and after it ends.

Good films are about reaction as well as action and good screenwriting involves not only the invention of strong dialogue but knowing when words are not the best storytellers. He recounts a memorable incident when he was a trainee at Ealing. A scene had been worked over by two good writers. It involved a young wife and her ex-lover meeting again and the girl refusing the temptation to renew their affair. It was sparkling but far too long. With twenty- five pages of dialogue it had become a play within a play, entirely distracting from the main force of the storyline. He distilled it to a central moment when the lover puts ‘their’ record on the gramophone and moves to kiss her. She- holds him off with “mm-mm.” He asks” “mm-mm?” She repeats “mm-mm,” but with tenderness. He accepts gracefully and she, with a wealth of meaning, says “Thank you,” the only spoken words left in the scene.

Fernando Arrabal, director of the ground-breaking Viva la muerte, claimed that you could learn everything you needed to know about film-making in ten days. He was a radical, but there is one sense in which Sandy Mackendrick, a traditionalist, might have agreed with him. Ten days might indeed suffice for learning everything you could be taught about film-making. It would, however, take the rest of your life tor perfect its practice. For his epilogue, Paul Cronin has chosen a note Sandy left about the uses of film theory. In it he suggests that when a project is flowing well, technique is often instinctive and intuitive and that no director really works with a head full of grammatical regulations. Rather, grammar comes into its own as a diagnostic tool when problems arise. He always said that successful films are not produced by obeying rules, but that bad films are often the result of breaking them.