Scotland At The Movies

18 March 2009, 17:47

Alexander Mackendrick (1912 - 1993)

Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents had emigrated from Scotland shortly before, but when Mackendrick was six, his father died from the influenza epidemic that swept the world just after World War I. His mother, desperate for work, took on work as a dress designer and the boy was sent back to Scotland when he was seven years old to live with his grandfather. The boy never saw or heard from his mother again.

After a lonely and strict Presbyterian childhood in Glasgow he went to the Glasgow School of Art and became an art director in the advertising business. His first film work was scripting cinema commercials and he, along with many others who became stalwarts of the British film industry,  went on to make several films during the war as part of the British propaganda effort. He was good at it, rising to become director of the film unit and green-lighting the classic Rossellini film, Rome, Open City.

After the war, he eventually  joined Ealing Studios and worked his way up to writing and directing his own feature films, among them Whisky Galore! (1949) and the Alec Guiness comedies, The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955)

The story goes that Monja Danischewsky, who acted as producer on Whisky Galore!, had a liberal outlook and rather celebrated the islanders spot of free-booting, whereas Mackendrick, with his Calvinist upbringing, saw Basil Radford's Captain Waggett as the hero of the piece. The two clashed throughout the production.

Buoyed by this success, he went to Hollywood. Several successes followed such as Sweet Smell of Success (1957),  Sammy Going South (1963), A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), and Don’t Make Waves (1967).  But he fell foul of the studio system and found working as a freelance difficult and exhausting. He was Dean of the film school of the California Institute of the Arts, better known as CalArts and later professor. Due to severe emphysema, Mackendrick was unable to go home to Europe during much of his time at the college. He stayed with the school until he died of pneumonia in 1993.

His reputation now rests largely on the Ealing films, to which he brought a lightness of touch while retaining an ironic tone and an unfailing gift for keeping the narrative moving at just the right pace.

He never regretted stopping directing. It was both his luck and his misfortune to have served apprenticeships in large organisations (JWT, the Army, Ealing Studios), where he was insulated from the hard-edged, deal-making side of the creative industries: "I've always been happiest in these big organisations", he once said, "where I'm free to make mischief from within - where I get all the centralised support, but I've got enough skill to exploit it for my own benefit".

Last updated: 20 March 2009, 14:37