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Sweet smell of skill

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT: Alec Guinness stars in the most inspired of Mackendrick’s Ealing films.

The Ealing comedies of the '40s and '50s were famously script-driven, so it's not a surprise to find that Sandy Mackendrick wrote movies before he began directing them. The screenplays of his four Ealing pictures were written by others; yet it would be unfair to say that as a filmmaker he simply served the material he was handed. He has a distinctive, if muted, visual style. He's splendid at evoking atmosphere, whether of scruffy forgotten wharfs (THE MAGGIE; 1954; January 12) and tiny, intimate coastal towns (WHISKY GALORE!; 1949; January 12) or big cities: a fairy-tale-like, latter-day-Dickensian London in THE LADYKILLERS (1955; January 9), a bustling, night-blooming Manhattan, ripe with the rot of moral corruption, in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957; January 10), both marvelously stylized.

He often makes his points through skillful layered staging and canny camera placement. His preference for medium and long shots to allow the action within the frame to tell the story also tends to underscore the wry tone of the comedies — in the lackadaisical movement of the dilapidated boat in The Maggie, the ancient "puffer" whose third-generation Scots captain (Alex Mackenzie) talks his way into ferrying cargo for an American airline millionaire (Paul Douglas), or in the hilariously grotesque deaths of the thieves in The Ladykillers who are bested by a blissfully unaware landlady (Katie Johnson), a survivor of the Edwardian age they unwisely figure in their scheme to move their stolen money. And because Mackendrick picks and chooses his close-ups, they're often eloquent, like the shot of Mackenzie's face when the skipper learns that the American, fed up with the slow, tortuous journey and with his own unexcitable willfulness and wiliness, has decided to buy the boat out from under him.

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