Old Yorker

  • Whisky Galore!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Mackendrick (1949)

    The film is what it says on the tin, or the bottle – down to the exclamation mark that’s absent from the title of the 1947 novel by Compton MacKenzie (who did the screenplay with Angus MacPhail).  Alexander Mackendrick, whose first feature this was, directs with confident flair.  The lighting by Gerald Gibbs does justice to the Hebridean landscape and the Atlantic Ocean beyond (the film was shot on the island of Barra).  Their dramatic beauty contrasts with the comic tone of the story and with the relentlessly jaunty music by Ernest Irving.  (The visuals are the only justification for screening the film as part of ‘Dark Ealing’ in BFI’s two-month chiaroscuro season.)   Whisky Galore! is widely regarded as a minor classic.  How much you enjoy it depends on how amusing you find the isle of Todday’s whisky famine, the locals’ resourceful efforts to remedy the situation (a freighter with a cargo of whisky sinks off the island) and, when they succeed, to keep hold of the ‘water of life’ and thwart the home guard captain and customs officers who try to confiscate it.  Many people find alcohol obtained and consumed in a more or less illicit way a powerful comic fuel.  Rationed post-war British audiences certainly must have done and so did the NFT1 audience last night.

    How far away I am from feeling this way is best illustrated by the fact that just about the only person in Whisky Galore! I felt any sympathy for was the character who’s the butt of the jokes throughout the picture.  It’s to Basil Radford’s credit that he makes the futilely conscientious Home Guard Captain Waggett – and his repeatedly foiled attempts to do what he sees as the right thing – rather touching.  Gordon Jackson gives a graceful comic performance as George Campbell, a schoolteacher in love:  he’s also a worm that turns against his moralising scold of a mother (played with almost alarming intensity by Jean Cadell).  George has his heart set on the local storekeeper’s daughter Catriona (Gabrielle Blunt).  Her sister Peggy is played by Joan Greenwood whose famous voice, as usual, got on my nerves – although she’s strikingly pretty here.  The cast also includes Catherine Lacey (Waggett’s wife), Bruce Seton (his sergeant and Peggy’s young man), Wylie Watson (the storekeeper), James Robertson Justice (a doctor) and John Gregson (a key player in the salvaging of the whisky from the sinking freighter).  In Ealing comedy, local communities often work together to outwit spoilsport authority.  In this case, though, it’s tiresomely one-way traffic – the inept bureaucrats are made fools of over and over.  Peggy is the telephonist in the village store:  at one point she replies to a caller ‘Top Priority?  No, I don’t think there’s anyone of that name here …’  That’s pretty typical of the level of verbal wit in Whisky Galore!  The film naturally calls to mind Dad’s Army and surely inspired some of what Bill Forsyth put in Local Hero but it’s vastly inferior to them both.

    16 November 2012

  • Lone Star

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Sayles (1996)

    In the opening fifteen minutes or so of Lone Star the audience is introduced to a large cast of characters in Rio County, Texas – white, black, Hispanic, in the present and the past.  The film is ambitious in the sense that John Sayles means to paint on a broad canvas.  He evidently wants to educate the viewer:  the characters impart information and make points about the ethnic and political history of Texas as if we were going to be tested at the end of the movie.  Although some of the people are brought to life by the actors playing them, this is not enough to obscure the writer-director’s didactic intentions.  The plot is worked out so as to illustrate the interracial tensions and complexities of the place, the ironic shifts in social status and values of succeeding generations of the same families.

    At the heart of Lone Star is Sam Deeds, who grew up in Rio County and has returned there as sheriff.  When a couple of off-duty soldiers exploring the desert near their army base discover a partly buried skull and a sheriff’s badge, it’s the trigger for Sam to reopen an investigation into the disappearance, many years ago, of one his predecessors – the notorious Charlie Wade, a racist psychopath who tyrannised the place.  Sam’s father Buddy, Wade’s successor as sheriff, had the nerve to take him on.  Chris Cooper seems physically reduced by Sam’s awareness that the folks of Rio County think he’ll never be the man his father was.  Sam is also energised by wanting to find out whether Buddy really was the man sanctified by local legend – and whether he killed Wade, as Sam suspects he did.  Cooper is marvellous – Lone Star would be a much better film if it was more focused on Sam (and shorter) and if John Sayles had done more to develop his character.

    Because of his preoccupation with delivering an essay on Texas, Sayles doesn’t give enough attention – or much originality, at any rate – to people’s relationships and situations.  They’re rather clichéd – enlivened only by the surprising (and not so surprising) revelations of who-fathered-or-killed-who that keep being sprung.  The cast includes: Elizabeth Peña as the widowed Mexican teacher Sam loved as a teenager and wants to love again; Kris Kristofferson as the vile Charlie Wade (his trimness and relaxed presence make the character less obvious than it might be but it’s still basically a smiley villain turn); Matthew McConaughey as Buddy Deeds (he soon gives us clues that he’s not a one hundred per cent hero); and Clifton James, who’s excellent as Wade’s former sidekick and now the mayor of Rio County.  Frances McDormand has a small role:  her performance, like several others in the movie, is vivid but suffers from make-the-most-of-your-brief-appearance syndrome.  There are fine images of the landscape, photographed by Stuart Dryburgh, and a notably eclectic soundtrack that’s a bit too pleased with its eclecticism.

    20 May 2012

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