Alexander Mackendrick

[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.

[DB7]

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.

[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.

[julian_craster]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit Oxford DNB: Lives of the week



Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), film director, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 8 September 1912, the only son of Francis Robert (Frank) Mackendrick (d. 1918), shipbuilding draughtsman and civil engineer, and his wife, Martha, nee Doig. Both parents were Scottish. His father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his mother, attempting to establish a career as a dress designer, agreed to Alexander's returning to Scotland with his grandfather. He was educated at Hillhead School, Glasgow, until 1926, when his outstanding drawing talents enabled him to enrol at the Glasgow School of Art. He left in 1929 without taking his degree, and travelled to London to work for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. He rose to become one of the agency's top art directors, but his fascination with the cinema led him to collaborate with his cousin Roger MacDougall on a script, 'War on Wednesday', that was filmed in 1937 as Midnight Menace. For J. Walter Thompson he scripted and storyboarded five Horlicks commercials, which were filmed by the Hungarian animated film-maker George Pal. On 24 March 1934 he married Eileen Mary Ascroft (1914-1962), a women's magazine journalist.

During the Second World War Mackendrick made propaganda films for the Ministry of Information, and in 1943 joined a psychological warfare unit headed by the future Labour minister Richard Crossman. In 1944 he was given the task of monitoring film production in Italy, giving official approval to Roberto Rossellini's Rome-Open City (1945) and organizing documentary reportage of the uncovering of the Fosse Ardeantine massacre for Giorni di gloria (1945). When the war was over he spent a brief period with MacDougall making Ministry of Information documentaries and then joined Ealing Studios as a scriptwriter and sketch artist. After storyboarding and co-scripting Basil Dearden's Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948) and Charles Crichton's Another Shore (1948) he was given the opportunity to direct a low-budget comedy, Whisky Galore! (1949), filmed on the island of Barra in 1948. The film was only modestly successful in Britain but was hugely popular in both America (as Tight Little Island) and France (as Whisky a Gogo). His first marriage having ended in divorce in 1943, Mackendrick married Hilary Lloyd (b. 1924/5), a film publicity worker, on Christmas eve 1948, while the success of Whisky Galore! was still uncertain.

After acting as second unit director on Basil Dearden's The Blue Lamp (1950) and Charles Crichton's Dance Hall (1950) Mackendrick began work on his second film as director, The Man in the White Suit (1951), based on an unperformed play by Roger MacDougall about a man who invents a material that never gets dirty and never wears out. Though it failed to emulate the international success of Whisky Galore! it was generally well received, and its satirical attack on the timid obscurantism of British industry contradicts the idea of Ealing comedy as cosy, nostalgic, and reassuring. Three further films followed at Ealing: Mandy (1952), The Maggie (1954), and The Ladykillers (1955), all projects over which Mackendrick was able to exert considerable personal control and all confirming him as a talented and original director.

In October 1955 Ealing Studios was sold to the BBC, and Mackendrick went to Hollywood to make an adaptation of Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple. When casting problems delayed production he was assigned a tough New York black comedy, Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Putting Tony Curtis in a role that destroyed his matinee-idol image did little for the film's commercial prospects but Mackendrick won critical admiration for his evocation of a dark, slick, sleazy world, and the reputation of the film has continued to grow. He returned to England for the filming of The Devil's Disciple (1959) but disagreements with the film's two leading actors, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, led to his being replaced. Further disappointment followed when he was ousted as the director of the expensive wartime epic The Guns of Navarone (1961). What had seemed an extremely promising career now looked in jeopardy. He was rescued by his mentor at Ealing, Michael Balcon, who entrusted him with Sammy Going South (1963), an ambitious Technicolor epic about a ten-year-old boy's journey through Africa from Port Said (where his parents have been killed in a British bombing raid) to Durban. The film is unique in its uncondescending picture of Africa in the last days of British colonialism, but in 1963 it seemed irrelevant to the new world of the Beatles and Mary Quant, and failed to arouse much interest.

After making an episode of the American television series The Defenders ('The hidden fury', 1964) Mackendrick worked with John Osborne on a version of Moll Flanders and with Tony Hancock on an adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Neither project prospered, but a long-standing ambition to film Richard Hughes's novel A High Wind in Jamaica was unexpectedly realized in 1965. Mackendrick had proved his ability to inspire fine performances from children in Mandy, The Maggie, and Sammy Going South, and was a natural choice for a story that centred upon a group of children being kidnapped by pirates. Unfortunately what the film's backer, Twentieth Century Fox, wanted was a Disney-like adventure story that would ignore the sinister intimations of Hughes's novel, and Mackendrick needed all his patience, guile, and persistence to make a film that remained true to the spirit of the book. Twentieth Century Fox took their revenge by cutting the film down from 135 to 103 minutes, but it remained a disturbing, significant, and visually sophisticated film.

Mackendrick's next-and last-feature film, Don't Make Waves (1967), also suffered from producer interference, but here the script was much weaker and Mackendrick himself regarded it as irredeemable. In 1969, after his plans for a personal and idiosyncratic version of the Mary, queen of Scots, story was aborted by the abrupt withdrawal of American financial support from British film production, he accepted the post of dean of the California Institute of the Arts film school. He remained as dean until 1978, and after stepping down continued to teach there until his death, in Los Angeles on 22 December 1993. He was survived by his wife, Hilary.

Mackendrick was always reluctant to regard himself as a victim, and blamed his inadequacy as deal-maker for his difficulties. He told one interviewer that:

To spend, say 50 per cent of your time trying to get the job, and 50 per cent of your time doing the job-that's a fair break. If you spend 95 per cent of your time trying to get the job, and only five per cent doing it, you're in the wrong business. (Kemp, Lethal Innocence, 236)
It remains a matter of shame and regret that a director of his stature should abandon film-making. But his decision to quit meant that for over twenty years he enjoyed a second career as a teacher of film, which brought both him and his pupils immense satisfaction.

The variety of Mackendrick's work and the fact that his best-loved films-Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers-were comedies has militated against his being considered one of the great film directors. He himself never made the mistake of not taking comedy seriously, arguing that 'To be frivolous about trivial things is childish-but to make fun of things that really scare you, that if you like is the basis of truth in comedy' (Kemp, 'Saving grace', 149). Even his most congenial comedy, Whisky Galore!, has a sharp edge, and the affection for the quaint and eccentric in The Ladykillers masks a thrillingly macabre story. Once they are set against a wider framework than that offered by Ealing, Mackendrick's comedies, together with Mandy, The Sweet Smell of Success, Sammy Going South, and A High Wind in Jamaica, can be seen as part of a body of work that is full of insight, wisdom, and humanity.

Robert Murphy

Sources P. Kemp, Lethal innocence: the cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (1991) + C. Barr, Ealing Studios (1977) + 'Tavernier on Mackendrick', Sight and Sound (Aug 1994), 16-21 + P. Kemp, 'Saving grace: Mackendrick at Quimper', Sight and Sound (summer 1990), 149 + P. Kemp, 'There are no rules: the film teaching of Alexander Mackendrick', Metro, 113/114 (1998), 91-5 + 'Alexander Mackendrick', Film Dope (June 1987), 35-7 + C. Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British character: Ealing Studios, part 2', Screen, 15/2 (summer 1974), 126-63 + A. Mackendrick, 'A film director and his public', The Listener (23 Sept 1961), 482-3, 489 [transcript of talk given on the Home Service, 15 Sept 1961] + P. Goldstone, 'The Mackendrick legacy', American Film, new ser., 4 (March 1979), 66-9 + 'Mandy: daughter of transition', All our yesterdays, ed. C. Barr (1986), 335-61 + P. Kemp, 'Mackendrickland', Sight and Sound (winter 1988-1989), 48-52 + The Independent (28 Dec 1993) + The Independent (1 Jan 1994)
Archives NL Scot., corresp. with James Kennaway FILM 'Scope: Alexander Mackendrick', interview with A. M. on career in film industry and teaching at California Institute of the Arts by W. Gordon Smith, BBC 1, Scotland, 17 March 1975, dir. / prod. W. Gordon Smith + 'Mackendrick: the man who walked away', survey of A. M.'s career, incl. interviews, Scottish TV, 21 August 1986, prod. Russell Galbraith, dir. Dermot McQuarrie + 'Typically British', dir. Stephen Frears, Channel 4, 2 Sept 1995, includes comments from Mackendrick on British cinema
Likenesses R. McLean, drawing, 1939, repro. in The Independent (1 Jan 1994) · photographs, 1948-57, Hult. Arch. · J. Deakin, photograph, c.1954, NPG [see illus.]

[CaptainWaggett]

Surely Whisky Galore wasn't low budget? It had the largest location unit of any British film up to that point (and went well over-budget, almost unheard of at Ealing)

[agutterfan]

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.

I adore Sweet Smell of Success, one of the great American films. It's style is noticeable for long-takes and extensive use of following crane shots, the actors able to give long continuous performances. Although not a hit Hecht-Hill-Lancaster were hugely impressed by Sandy (as his friends called him). So much so, they wanted him to direct Separate Tables. However, because of budgetary restraints, they wanted him to abandon that style, because it's time-consuming and costly on film (if you make a mistake you have to start the long-take again from the beginning), and film it more conventionally (master, two shots etc). He declined the offer.

[Dave Rattigan]

I never realized until just now that Sandy is short for Alexander. My dad is an Alexander, and his family has always called him Sandy. I always assumed he had sandy hair when he was growing up!

[Steve Crook]

I never realized until just now that Sandy is short for Alexander. My dad is an Alexander, and his family has always called him Sandy. I always assumed he had sandy hair when he was growing up!

Ubiquitous presenter Alexander Armstrong (also of "Armstrong and Miller" fame) is known as Zander (spelt Xander)

Steve

[CaptainWaggett]

Ubiquitous presenter Alexander Armstrong (also of "Armstrong and Miller" fame) is known as Zander (spelt Xander)

Steve

I assume that's the toff's version. Sandy is the Scottish one - see also newsreader Sandy Gall and golfer Sandy Lyle.

[Dave Rattigan]

That would make sense, Cap'n -- my dad was Glasgow-born.