Alexander Mackendrick

[julian_craster]

From Roger

The Independent Film Studies
One wee drop of the real stuff - that did the trick for our Sandy
By David Thomson

Published: 09 October 2005

There has always been a vein of British crime films in which decent,
law-abiding people are invested in the crime itself. In Kind Hearts and
Coronets, we want the upstart Louis Mazzini to murder every d'Ascoyne in
sight because we might be republicans. I recall a TV film about the
Bywaters-Thompson murder case of the Twenties where the poisoning was driven
by the quality of the sex that went on. But no case was more pardonable than
Whisky Galore! (1949) in which some law-abiding but crafty Scots become
smugglers because shipwreck has made them an offer they could not refuse -
whisky, on the rocks, already.

Whisky Galore! is released on DVD tomorrow (Optimum £19.99) and I suspect
that many will fall upon it with glee. The movies are very often about the
expression of lurking desires, and the craving for the real stuff is light
enough to shine through the darkness of criminal conspiracy. The film is
funny, but the need is authentic, and nothing can mask the desperate desire
in Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, James Robertson Justice and the several
other Scottish actors. The film came from a novel by Compton MacKenzie, and
it was directed by Alexander or Sandy Mackendrick, who is a case all on his
own.

Mackendrick was a Scot, born in Boston, in 1912, because his parents were on
holiday there. Back home, he was a student at the Glasgow School of Art and
a graphic artist in advertising. But in the late Thirties, he turned to film
and as war broke out he was hired by the Ministry of Information. After the
war, he went to Ealing and wrote a few scripts - the big flop, Saraband for
Dead Lovers, and that formative hit, The Blue Lamp. Thus he was established,
and in the early Fifties he made a run of films: Whisky Galore!; The Man in
the White Suit (with Alec Guinness); Mandy (about a deaf child); The Maggie
(a rather laborious comedy, with American actor Paul Douglas increasingly
frustrated in the Highlands); and The Ladykillers.

That last was such a hit that Mackendrick was recruited for America by the
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster company, and so it was that he made Sweet Smell of
Success(1957). Today, that is a very famous piece of noir film. There are
devotees who can recite the glittering dialogue that passes between gossip
columnist J H Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and "arsenic cookie" publicist
Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis). Moreover, the look of the film (as photographed
by James Wong Howe) is one of the first impressions of modern Manhattan at
night. The film certainly broke fresh ground. The press had never been shown
as so corrupt. America had rarely been portrayed as so loathsome - or
enticing.

That delight did come later. Mackendrick had been raised at Ealing by the
studio head Michael Balcon to be respectful of budget and economy. Sweet
Smell of Success was not a hit, and it was made at a time when displaying
too many streaks of anti-Americanism was asking for trouble. Later on in
life, Mackendrick was tough on his own film. He called it hopeless
melodrama, full of lines so exaggerated they can hardly be uttered with a
straight face.

There is truth in that. The film has a sluggish second half, and it founders
on the character of Hunsecker's adored but tedious sister - a creature from
a different kind of movie, and an increasing drag on the narrative of this
one. None of that really matters. The film was made in a delirious hurry.
Ernest Lehmann's original script was being polished or rewritten by Clifford
Odets - a great playwright of the 1930s, but a wreck by then - as the
shooting went on. And everyone got what was special: that the stink and the
snarl of the real city were being delivered; and that two strange actors -
insecure yet tyrannical - Lancaster and Curtis, were getting the chance to
act without restraint. That's why nothing matters except for the first 40
minutes or so which, quite simply, changed talk on the American screen.

Did Mackendrick grasp that? I don't know. He had made a brilliant flop - but
he never got anywhere close to it again. There were a few more films, and A
High Wind in Jamaica deserves another look. But he soon retired, claiming
that he couldn't stand the climate of deal-making. Instead, in the early
Seventies he began to teach at CalArts, near Los Angeles. There is a very
good book, On Film-Making, that is derived from his class notes and it's
clear that he was happy teaching. His regrets? They stayed largely buried,
but if you look at Sweet Smell of Success or Whisky Galore! you can surely
feel the drive and the desperation in a man who was made for risk, not
security. He died in 1993 - his life might make a great film.