Hard to recognise, hard to forget
Patrick Boyle
LETHAL INNOCENCE: THE CINEMA OF ALEXANDER MACKENDRICK by Philip Kemp Methuen, £17.99, pp.298 There are few really good film directors. Beside the indisputable greats, there are a number of very competent ones, several fashionable ones, and a handful of flashy and self-indulgent ones. But there are few with such a firm mastery of their craft that you are conscious of the powerful impact of their films, yet unconscious of a unifying hand lying behind them. Sandy Mackendrick is one of those few, a man who chose off-beat stories that he could tell in strong visual images. Philip Kemp has written a book to celebrate a film director it's hailing taxis.' who is not so much underrated as under- publicised.
Mackendrick made nine films, including Whisky Galore, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy and The Ladykillers, which he made for Ealing Studios, and The Sweet Smell of Success and High Wind in Jamaica which he made for Hollywood producers. In each case he either co-wrote the screenplay or adapted another's screenplay to fit his visu- al conception. Superficially, his films seem to have little in common, until you notice, both with his comedies and his dramas, that all have a sharp, unsentimental, almost ruthless edge to them, unlike anyone else's work at the time, and certainly (since he is often grouped with the other Ealing direc- tors) very untypical of Ealing.
It is surely unthinkable in a comedy to ask us to identify with five lovable train robbers and then expect us to enjoy watch- ing them kill each other one by one in a violent and undignified manner. In Kind Hearts and Coronets you do not mind the killings, because you never get to know the victims. In The Ladykillers it is your friends that are being bumped off. In Sweet Smell of Success, two of Hollywood's favourite stars, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, play an influential columnist and a press agent, a pair of the most devious and uncompro- misingly repulsive parts ever conceived for leading roles. From a screenplay by Clifford Odets, set in an intentionally claustrophobic New York, Sweet Smell of Success still strikes me as probably the most cynical and powerfully satirical movie ever made.
Although always regarded as a British director, Sandy Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts of Scottish parents and is therefore half American. Determined to make films the way he wanted to make them, his career when he left Ealing was largely one of humiliation, frustration and forced compromises. He was made to leave after a week of shooting on The Devil's Disciple and fired from The Guns of Navarone. Many films he should have made collapsed at the last moment.
As an all-purpose employee at Woodfall Films in the mid-Sixties, I worked on Sandy Mackendrick's production of Rhinoceros, from the play by Ionesco. I had the stimulating task of searching for London locations to illustrate Sandy's con- ception of 'urban panic'. Halfway through our association, a workmanlike screenplay by Clive Exton was suddenly replaced by a complete re-write by Sandy which succeed- ed in being both much funnier and more frightening than the original, while intro- ducing a much tighter and more coherent storyline. I thought it was brilliant. However, two weeks before production was to start, the film was abandoned. Philip Kemp's sources suggest this was because Tony Hancock, the interesting choice of lead, had backed out. None of us in Woodfall believed that story. We heard that the producer, Oscar Lewenstein, had got cold feet about the project and was having problems with Sandy. Mackendrick could certainly be difficult; he had trouble expressing himself sometimes, especially to producers and technicians, and he had a reputation for going over budget. Whatever the real reasons, it seems unforgiveable that such a good script in the hands of such a good director should have been aborted. Mary Queen of Scots was another film which Sandy spent years trying to get off the ground. His agony and frustration are almost too painful to contemplate.
Regrettably, Philip Kemp's book con- tains all the irritations one has come to expect from a cineaste who writes for Sight and Sound. In a continual series of cross- references, scenes from one of Mackendrick's films are compared with similar scenes in another, and pointless parallels and contrasts are drawn. Key characters from films are given counter- parts in other films, suggestions are always being made of deeper meanings, some- times of national significance, beneath the surface. For instance, Kemp believes that The Man in The White Suit, Mandy and The Ladykillers are intended as a trilogy of iron- ic portraits of post-war England. The Ladykillers is really a 'political allegory'. Individual details take on a spurious impor- tance. The name of Mr Wilberforce, cho- sen for the central character in The Ladykillers, he decides, could not have been chosen at random. 'A side glance at the great 19th-century anti-slavery cam- paigner is surely intended.' Really? So what? Referring to The Man in The White Suit, Kemp says
it's appropriate that the spoiling actions should be triggered by a phone call. . . but, within Mackendrick's work as a whole, tele- phones figure as unreliable, even sinister, instruments.
I doubt if Mackendrick was obsessed with telephones but, even if he was, it does not throw any light on anything.
Good directors stage scenes in specific ways either because they are drawing on their skill to achieve the maximum comic or dramatic effect in the context of the story or because they instinctively feel that a particular thing is right. In-jokes or spe- cial references or subliminal meanings, whether they exist or not, do not make a better film or its director a more interest- ing director, except perhaps to certain habitués of the National Film Theatre.
However, if you skip Kemp's self-indul- gent analysis of each film, you are left with a readable and absorbing account of Mackendrick's struggles in the film indus- try, how each film got to be made, how it was received and, in his later career, how his intentions and ideas had to be compro- mised to get a rare film (especially his most cherished project High Wind in Jamaica) off the ground at all.
But the best thing about Kemp's book is his genuine love and measured admiration for Mackendrick's work. He rightly identi- fies many of the special qualities that make Mackendrick unlike any other director: the `sheer joy of his narrative drive', his ironic humour, his ruthless lack of sentimentality (irresistible, you might think, on a subject such as Mandy, in which the heroine is a deaf child); his daring choice of subjects, particularly the comedies whose high points are more often associated with pain than with humour (the best example being Alec Guinness's humiliation in The Man in the White Suit); his distaste for traditional heroes and preference for leading charac- ters that are complex or ambivalent, espe- cially when they are children; and, of course, the remarkable performances he drew from all the leading children in his films.
It cannot be denied that probably the strongest single impression created by Mackendrick's directional career is one of frustration, of great potential left unful- filled — which may partly account for the critical neglect of his work . . If he never quite succeeded in producing the cinematic masterpieces of which, on all the evidence, he was capable, he still created a body of work that, for its subtlety and indi- viduality, its visual and conceptual energy, its darkness and its humour, bears comparison with that of any other director.
You can enjoy the book without re-see- ing Mackendrick's films. But you should see them again anyway.
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