Alexander Mackendrick - Mary Queen of Scots.

[DB7]

The lost queen

The great British director Alexander Mackendrick never got to make his final project - it was abruptly shut down by a Hollywood studio, and Mackendrick retired from film-making. Hilary, his wife, introduces his lost masterwork, Mary Queen of Scots.

Hilary Mackendrick
Friday June 4, 2004
The Guardian

On February 8 1969, my film director husband Sandy Mackendrick left for Scotland to finalise locations for a film about Mary Queen of Scots. His diary shows meetings with Miss Crufts at Edinburgh's Department of Ancient Monuments, and a plethora of appointments with actors, stuntmen and journalists. Sandy returned to London and continued pre-production and budget meetings. On April 13 the diary noted: "Bad news to come." The bad news did come - a week or so later. Universal, the studio producing the film, cancelled all European productions.
It's no surprise that the Mary Queen of Scots story has long fascinated writers. Over a period of a dozen years or so, Sandy had written an original story, working on it in between other films. His point of view was to present a character study in a series of private and personal relationships. Mary had left Scotland in exile to France at the age of three, returning at 18 - French-speaking, already widowed - to be Queen of Scotland. Her arrival was greeted by a heartwarming display of affection from the people of Edinburgh. Seven years later she was marched through the streets under arrest while the same citizens demanded her execution as a murderer.

The film was finally greenlit with Sandy Lieberson producing for Universal Pictures, shooting at Pinewood Studios. But when it was shut down it was a body blow. Sandy had other projects - in June he met with Ross MacDonald about the possibility of filming one of his Lew Archer novels, The Galton Case - but he was tired of making deals, not pictures, and he was ready to make a positive decision when he was offered a teaching job at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), in Valencia, north of Los Angeles.

CalArts was a controversial institution in the 1970s - always stimulating. It was Sandy's fourth and last career; he had started in the art department of the J Walter Thompson advertising agency in the 1930s. After 10 years there he was recruited for the psychological warfare branch of the Allied Command in North Africa and Italy. The third profession, feature film-making, from 1946 to 1969, which resulted in work as varied as The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success, led him to the fourth and most fulfilling - that of an educator who was able to pass on to others all he had learned himself.

The one thing he did not get around to was writing The Book. But timing and good luck prevailed. His younger son John, and former alumnus Jack Valero, who must have sensed an impending earthquake, moved his copious drawings, illustrations, storyboards, articles and writing out of his office - thereby avoiding the destruction of the building during the 1974 Northridge quake. Part of what they saved is what you see here.