Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 11/22/2025

Alexander Mackendrick

No, you probably don't know Alexander Mackenrick's name, but I assure you that you know at least one of his movies, the original The Ladykillers. And behind that layer of anonymity lies one of the most technically accomplished and intelligent directors to come out of the WWII era of British filmmaking. Only separated by seven years for his first feature compared with David Lean (Lean's first was in 1942, Mackendrick's was in 1949), Mackendrick actually started directing cinema commercials in the late 30s for a marketing firm before being hired by the Ministry of Information to make propaganda films through the duration of the war.

I bring up Lean because the two men had very obviously similar views on the role of the film director. Rising up through the industry as a screenwriter and production designer (Lean's rise was through the role of editor), Mackendrick saw the film director's job as requiring intimate understanding of every aspect of a production. A film director should be able to essentially do any job on a film set at the same level as any craftsman given the more minor tasks could. He should be screenwriter, production designer, set dresser, cinematographer, and actor all in one, able to understand the craft of everyone involved in order to appropriately assemble the vision at the center of the film. A film director is both artist and craftsman, and that overall ethos was something he shared with Lean. It must have been something in the water in Britain in the 40s.

What really differentiates Mackendrick from Lean is twofold. The first is that Mackendrick's feature film directing career started at Ealing Studios, the small production company mostly known for comedies (one of his early films there, Mandy, is an outright drama, though), and the second reason is that Mackendrick...gave up on making movies. After the 1967 bomb Don't Make Waves, which is mostly notable for being Sharon Tate's feature film debut, Mackendrick decided that he didn't have the skillset necessary to schmooze producers for film jobs, so he retired from filmmaking and became the first dean of the film school at CalArts, stepping down after a decade and teaching for the rest of his professional life. His most prominent student would probably end up being James Mangold, director of Ford v. Ferrari, Logan, and A Complete Unknown.

So, why would someone like Mackendrick give up on filmmaking to just teach?

Ealing Studios

Mackendrick got his first directing job through several years of working as a screenwriter at Ealing. Whisky Galore! was supposed to be directed by Ronold Neame, but he turned the assignment down, opening it up to those who wanted their shot at the directing job. Mackendrick showed up on location (an unusual setup for an Ealing film, necessary in this instance because all of their studio space was being used up), threw out the script completely, and worked with his pair of writers to come up with something new, using the same basic bones as the original script. It was a success, a sort of based on real life tale of a small island community, cut off from all booze during rationing in the middle of the war, suddenly being granted great bounty in the form of a cargo ship crashing just off shore, full of whisky.

And Mackendrick's time at Ealing was largely managing these kinds of productions to different degrees of success. The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers both feature very different performances from Alec Guinness in his prime (the second film is an inspired Alistair Sim impression), but the common hand across all of these accomplished films, which include the lesser but entertaining works of Mandy, the story of a deaf girl, and The Maggie, a farce with a more serious minded ending about a cargo ship not up for the task it gets, is Mackendrick's. They're all well-made, with strong scripts, and show a young director with a strong eye, a hand for comedy, good relationships with actors, and command of narrative.

And then, he went to America.

Hecht-Hill-Lancaster


One of the most important independent producing partnerships in the 50s, the final years of the studio era, was the company formed by Harold Hecht, James Hill, and Burt Lancaster, and they snatched up the promising young director from Scotland (actually, Mackendrick was born in Boston, just raised on Glasgow) to direct the adaptation of Ernest Lehman's novelette Tell Me About It Tomorrow!. Lehman was hired originally as the screenwriter, but had to leave the production with about a month left in pre-production. HHL hired Clifford Odets to do the final rewrites, which everyone assumed would be a quick job, but encouraged by Mackendrick, the rewrite process went all the way through the entire production.

And that's indicative of a major problem Mackendrick had when it came to his production approach. He wanted to take his time. Time always equals money, and when you spend $1 million on the production of Sweet Smell of Success, a major investment for an independent production company, and that film actually loses $400,000 upon its original release, it's going to cause friction with those producers. Which it did.

When I do these surveys of a filmmaker's work, I tend to avoid biography as I go through the films. I want to figure out the films, and I don't usually care that much about the people themselves. However, there's a six year gap between Sweet Smell of Success and his next film, Sammy Going South, and it's important.

HHL wasn't done with Mackendrick after the financial disappointment of Sweet Smell of Success. They had little but good things to say about the exacting filmmaker, and they greenlit his next film, The Devil's Disciple, a project that originally attracted Mackendrick to work with HHL. However, HHL fired Mackendrick from the adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play (replaced with Guy Hamilton) after a month of production. That's a setback, but it wasn't the only one.

He was also the original director of The Guns of Navarone, but was fired a week before production started in 1960.

He spent the next three years in the wilderness until one of the original producers from Ealing, Hal Mason, hired him to direct an adaptation of the W.H. Canaway novel, Sammy Going South, a story about a ten year old boy walking from the Suez Canal to South Africa after his parents are killed in a bomb attack. I genuinely think this movie is really good, but it also represented a setback for Mackendrick. The American distributors recut and cut down the film so much, taking out so much of the running time that they had to commission a new score to fit the film while retitling it A Boy Ten Feet Tall (I'll be honest, I prefer the American title).

If I were Mackendrick, I'd be exhausted and frustrated at this point.

Final Films


Mackendrick didn't quite give up after Sammy Going South. He made two more films. The first, A High Wind in Jamaica has many elements that make it look like, on the surface, a live-action Disney film from the era. Six kids in the late 19th century get kidnapped by pirates and must warm their icy hearts. Except, Mackendrick, working from the novel by Richard Hughes, goes darker with more child danger than the implied genre connection would indicate. The film is pretty good with a near-manic performance by Anthony Quinn and a noteworthy early performance from James Coburn.

However, you can just feel that he's lost with his final film, Don't Make Waves, an anti-beach party movie that reunited him with his Sweet Smell of Success star Tony Curtis. Curtis plays a man who arrives in California with nothing, gets wooed by two women (one of whom is Claudia Cardinale) while lusting after a third (the aforementioned Sharon Tate). It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's weirdly...not funny from the guy who made The Ladykillers, and it ends with a big special effects sequence where the underlying dramatic point is that the materialistic beach life is empty and without meaning.

I mean...no wonder it didn't make much money at the box office and people haven't rushed to defend it over the years. And the reality of the production, which Tate called not particularly pleasurable, was enough to just get Mackendrick to stop making films altogether.

Themes


All this is fine and good, but did he actually, you know, inject something personal into his films? Did he just make generic entertainments that anyone could have made with his skill, or did he have some unique perspective that seeped into everything?

It's the latter. He was a filmmaker who, in his own small way, pulled productions towards his own thematic concerns. And that really centers on the ideas of corruption of authority contrasted with portraits of innocence with really interesting variations. The first is his first film, Whisky Galore! where he's on record as actually feeling more akin to the antagonist of the film, the very Scottish authority figure out to ruin everyone's fun by getting them to turn over the whisky they took from a shipwreck. In The Ladykillers, the innocent Mrs. Wilberforce gets to face the group of thieves taking up temporary residence in her house. In The Maggie, the powerful magnate who tries to buy everyone ends up learning the value of a smaller existence through the pratfalls of the boating crew he accidentally hires.

He's one of those filmmakers that doesn't have a very distinct visual flair (he filmed very handsomely and very classically), but actually did bend films to what he wanted to say. The problem is that he just...stopped making movies, so his body of work is so small and so much is in comedy, which no one really takes seriously, so he never really had the time to develop the ideas and people are dismissive of his comedies as just comedies not worthy of actual serious consideration.

In Retrospect


I know enough about the filmmaking process to understand that the management of a filmset is difficult and draining. That it takes, often, 16-hour days to manage departments, film scenes, deal with actors and problems on set, and that's after you've secured funding to get everyone in place. The schmoozing with studio heads, producers, and independent money sources just to get that set together in the first place is a whole other set of skills. A modern example to point to would be Terry Gilliam who spends years between productions, traveling around Europe begging for people for money. And that's simply a different skillset.

And a guy who runs off to academia in order to not deal with it obviously doesn't want to exercise that skillset. To bring in another modern example, I think of Peter Weir, the Australian filmmaker who simply gave up filmmaker a few years after the release of his final movie, The Way Back, when he grew tired of dealing with producers and actors who demanded things from him (Ethan Hawke knows the particular actor that ticked off Weir, but he's not sayin' who).

So, Mackendrick retreated to a safe space where he could think about the craft, help people with their own craft, and still affect things for decades more. Don't Make Waves was released in 1967, and he kept teaching at CalArts until his death in 1991 of emphysema.

It's easy to sit on the sidelines, decades after his death, never having dealt with his professional troubles myself, and demand that he pick himself up, rub some dirt on it, and go back to entertaining me. So, I'm not going to shake my fist at a dead man. Instead, I will thank him. His was a consummate craftsman who understood moviemaking at a level that I never will. If he had made 10-20 more films, he'd be much more widely recognized as a master of the form, but his limited output also limits his appeal to a certain degree. He doesn't have the visual distinctiveness of a Stanley Kubrick to get him over that hump, either.

Plus, you know, most of his well-known films are comedies, and no one respects that.

But I do. Mackendrick was a master at the form, and he should be celebrated more.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Wicked For Good

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Wisky Galore! (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a solid directorial debut. [Library]

The Man in the White Suit (Rating 4/4) Review "Mackendrick had a writing credit on this, and he shepherded a completely new script once on location on the former film, so it's safe to say that he's putting himself into these films, and I'm seeing the beginnings of something...interesting. And surprisingly dark considering the comic nature of his first two films." [Library]

Mandy (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Handsome, well-acted, and really surprisingly involving, Mandy is very much worthwhile." [Library]

The Maggie (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This is not some grand piece of cinema, but it's a nice bit of populist cinema that is worthy of discovery." [Amazon Prime]

The Ladykillers (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a treasure, a gem of British comedy. It might be Mackendrick's best film, but I've seen so little of what comes that it's just hard to imagine him topping this." [Personal Collection]

Sweet Smell of Success (Rating 3/4) Full Review "And Mackendrick manages everything with real skill and intelligence, creating this propulsive narrative dripping with tension without losing sight of humanity at the same time. It's a real triumph of filmmaking. [Personal Collection]

Sammy Going South (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "IThat the American version (retitled A Boy Ten Feet Tall, a title actually much prefer) cut out a bunch doesn't really surprise me, but I don't think I'd want to cut much. This is very good as it is." [Youtube]

High Wind in Jamaica (Rating 3/4) Full Review "II do think a two-hour and ten-minute long version of this would probably work better than the one-hour and forty-minute version, but the abbreviated cut we have is a solid little entertainment that demonstrates Mackendrick's skill." [Youtube]

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