Alexander Mackendrick: The real ladykiller

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The real ladykiller.

Our critic looks at the turbulent career of the director Alexander Mackendrick, the genuis behind Ealing's classic comedies

IN 1968, the celebrated American film critic Andrew Sarris welcomed the reappearance on his radar of the director Alexander Mackendrick.
“Mackendrick returned to our attention in 1965,” he wrote, “and his career since then has followed the curious pattern of sexual sophistication and child-cult cultivation, but it is good to have him back.”

Sarris’s timing could hardly have been worse. The previous year Mackendrick had made his final film, Don’t Make Waves, a product, he later claimed, “of such silliness that it is a humiliation even to have to talk about it”. More than a decade in Hollywood, with all its botches and compromises, had caused Mackendrick to fall out of love with movie-making, and in 1969 he started a film teaching career that lasted until he died in 1993.

Mackendrick’s own path into film-making was idiosyncratic and happily coincided with the heyday of Ealing Studios, where he made the original The Ladykillers in 1955. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1912, he grew up in Glasgow, leaving Glasgow School of Art mid-course to work at the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. Here his film experience began in a small way with commercials for Horlicks. Directing work followed during the Second World War when in 1944 he filmed the Allied landings in Italy. Mackendrick’s big break, however, came in 1946 when he became a “very junior” contract writer at Ealing Studios.

Ealing was the fiefdom of the producer Michael Balcon, whose middle-of-the-road sensibilities and control over the studio’s activities suited some directors — Mackendrick was one — more than others.

“I had a disheartening time in many ways as a freelance director on the open market,” he later wrote, “something I was never really suited for. At Ealing there was a father figure — producer Sir Michael Balcon — who along with his administration protected me. For ten years I was horrendously spoiled, with all the logistical and financial problems lifted from my shoulders, even if I had to do the films they told me to.” The first film they told him to do was Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), which Mackendrick co-scripted, and the next year he made his directorial debut with Whisky Galore!

Immediately it was obvious that Mackendrick was not a typical Ealing director. Balcon had yoked Ealing to the war effort and turned out cheering propaganda films, but even afterwards the studio fought shy of “sex, conflict, self-interest, class-division, even cleverness” (the words of the Ealing chronicler Charles Barr), preferring to praise the gentleness of English community life.

But Mackendrick did not so much espouse English qualities as offer a critique of them. In Whisky Galore!, an English officer is outsmarted by Scots who plunder a cargo of whisky in what could be a commentary on England’s moribund role as the world’s policeman.

Whisky Galore! was followed by The Man in the White Suit, satirising the timid English response to innovation and the paralysis of British industry. In 1955, after two further Ealing movies, Mandy and The Maggie — the first a serious drama about a deaf girl, the second a comedy which revisits the Scotland that was so acutely sketched in Whisky Galore! — he made The Ladykillers.

With the writer William Rose, he came up with what he called “a comic and ironic joke about the condition of postwar England”. An old lady is cornered in her home by a gang of criminals who mirror various social stereotypes in 1950s England. “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 ship went down.” Yet somehow, she sees off all her assailants, who one by one meet sticky ends — which the viewer will regard either as a blessing or a national tragedy.

Ealing was then in its death throes and Mackendrick moved to America to make Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Although now revered, it performed badly at the box office — perhaps because it gives America an even rougher going-over than England got in The Ladykillers. A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) confirmed Mackendrick’s gift for directing children, but by the late Sixties he’d had enough.

His filmography, then, is comparatively slender, but prizing quality above quantity accords with Mackendrick’s attitudes. And we should not dismiss his 25 years of inspiring teaching, ballasted by half a dozen classic films that still look good now. Who can claim to have achieved as much?


On Film-making by Alexander Mackendrick, Faber, £25