Alexander Mackendrick

Alexander Mackendrick was the most important filmmaker of postwar British cinema. Existentially speaking, however, he was always an outsider. His two best-known works, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), are mostly remembered as highlights of the Ealing Comedy cycle and as tour-de-force performances by Alec Guinness; Sweet Smell of Success (1957), while highly respected as a classic of late film noir, is usually not considered as the work of a true auteur. In most accounts, the director of these films remains a question mark.

 

The so-called “rest” of Mackendrick’s oeuvre consists of unappreciated masterpieces like Mandy (1952) and A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), trailblazers (Whisky Galore!, 1949), fascinating experiments in coded autobiography (The Maggie, 1954) – and many setbacks: He was fired from several films for reasons of “creative differences.” His career was a disaster, but the films he was able to complete belong among the finest in world cinema since 1945.

 

Mackendrick was considered “difficult,” which means that he insisted on his vision of the world even though his works did not fit neatly into the generic boxes of his era. He was hard to categorize: born in Boston in 1912 as the child of Scottish immigrants, he was raised by his grandfather in Glasgow after his father died because his mother could no longer keep him. Apparently, Mackendrick never again saw his mother after this inter-family adoption. The motif of the stubborn, sometimes antisocial child who disrupts the adults' existence, appears in many of his films – especially in those which figure as the orphans of Mackendrick's oeuvre: Mandy, which irritated audiences and critics with its interior views of a child's fundamentally troubled soul, as well as Sammy Going South (1963) and A High Wind in Jamaica – films maudits par excellence, whose difficult productions have become legendary. 

 

Adults behaving like children also inhabit Mackendrick's works. The prototype for this is The Ladykillers:Professor Marcus' band of gangsters and their landlady, Mrs. Wilberforce, turn the lopsided house over the railway tunnel into a kind of gothic sandbox in which everyone – more or less innocently – interacts with each other as if they were blowing up frogs or tearing the wings off flies. The film can also be seen as a comic preview of the “Hammer Horror” that would dominate the following years in British cinema.

 

During his life, Alexander Mackendrick saw plenty of death, at least from a distance: the trained commercial artist was drafted in 1942 and served in a British propaganda unit, cobbling together the tools of psychological warfare, from flyers to films. After the war, he chose a career in movies, even if the business was as distasteful to him as that of advertising. A permanent job at Ealing Studios proved fortuitous: with his first film, Whisky Galore!, Mackendrick was already making film history. The populist comedy has a strong documentary current and shows its protagonists not as figures in a shooting gallery, but rather as skeptical contemporaries trying to deal with their lives (and some memorable opportunities) in a meaningful way. 

 

After the collapse of Ealing, Mackendrick gave Hollywood a try and created a stir with his grim satire, Sweet Smell of Success. After that, he failed to realize any of his most personal projects – he said he lacked the necessary huckster temperament. With the last of his credited works, Don't Make Waves (1967), he gave form to his growing sense of world-loathing. He then left the business and turned to education, working as the Dean of the School of Filmmaking at the California Institute of the Arts for a quarter of a century, until shortly before his death in 1993. To his students, Mackendrick often appeared as a broken man desperately trying to realize his dreams through them.