Alexander Mackendrick (1954)

The American screenwriter William Rose followed up Genevieve, his story of a beloved veteran car, with one about a superannuated cargo vessel.  The title transport in this Ealing comedy is a Clyde ‘puffer’, despised by shipping professionals but held in affection by the Glasgow public.  In Genevieve, the mostly good-humoured adversaries were two individuals, the owners of rival vehicles in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.  The Maggie[1] sets up a larger opposition between wily local underdogs and high-handed external agencies:  the puffer’s captain and its three-man crew versus a bulldozing American industrialist, his English sidekick and, by implication, the forces of technological progress and economic clout.  (Although this is technically an original screenplay, Rose was inspired by the short stories of Neil Munro (1863-1930), featuring the Clyde puffer Vital Spark and her canny skipper Para Handy.)  It’s a David-and-Goliath set-up typical of Ealing and comic terrain that Alexander Mackendrick had worked before, and to very similar effect, in Whisky Galore! (1949).

The big-shot self-made businessman (‘the American’ in the film’s opening titles) is Calvin B Marshall (Paul Douglas), who urgently needs furniture and mod cons delivered to his new Scottish holiday home on an island up the West Coast.  The Maggie’s captain, MacTaggart (Alex Mackenzie), who can’t get commissions from the shipping company, is out of funds to pay for renewal of his boat’s licence.  He overhears a conversation between the company head (Geoffrey Keen) and Pusey (Hubert Gregg), Marshall’s bowler-hatted, umbrella-toting acolyte:  the shipping company has nothing immediately available to carry Marshall’s consignment.  MacTaggart seizes the opportunity and tricks Pusey into thinking he’s offering as a conveyance the robust-looking craft docked next to The Maggie.  Before Pusey has time to realise his blunder, the valuable cargo is on its way aboard the clapped-out puffer but MacTaggart starts as he means to go on.  The Maggie’s progress is slow, to say the least.  An irate Marshall muscles in and boards the boat himself.  A full seven days later – after numerous delays and subterfuges on the part of MacTaggart and his crew, and failed attempts by Marshall to take control – The Maggie finally limps towards her destination.  When tide and winds drive her onto rocks, the only one way to save the puffer is to jettison the cargo, which MacTaggart failed to insure.  The last seen of the vessel, she’s back on the Clyde, renamed the Calvin B Marshall.

I hadn’t realised until seeing The Maggie that it influenced Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero more extensively than did Whisky Galore!  The islanders of the latter share with those of Local Hero a valuable commodity they want to make the most of, and which is coveted by interfering outsiders.  But evocations of The Maggie in Local Hero are more numerous.  The tycoon Felix Happer and his thwarted executive Mac can both claim kinship with Calvin B Marshall.  The latter, like Mac, has to make repeated telephone phone calls to try and sort things out, including calls from a quayside phone box, where he runs out of change.  The eccentric looks of MacTaggart’s first mate (James Copeland) and ancient engineer (Abe Barker) seem to foreshadow some of the Ferness fishermen’s faces.  An island community’s celebration of the hundredth birthday of Davy McDougall (Gilbert Stevenson), one of MacTaggart’s many stops en route, anticipates in various ways the ceilidh central to Forsyth’s film.  A shot of Marshall outside the window of the pub where this gathering takes place, shows him looking wistfully in.  He briefly joins the party, meets the birthday boy, then gets into conversation with Sheena (Fiona Clyne), a young local woman who can’t decide which of two men to marry.  When she tells him one is both more ambitious and more handsome than the other, Marshall thinks it’s a no-brainer.  Sheena replies that she thinks she’ll marry the other young man because she’ll see more of him.  Her surprising choice gives go-getting, wife-ignoring Marshall cause to wonder if his priorities are wrong.

Why is it that Local Hero is one of my favourite films but I find The Maggie, like Whisky Galore!, tedious and vexing?   Bill Forsyth treats his characters humorously but gives some of them surprising aspects and every one of them a fair hearing.  They have marine settings but there’s no ebb and flow in the fortunes of opposing interests in either of Alexander Mackendrick’s films.  The role of patsy in The Maggie passes from one inept authority figure to the next in a kind of relay.  Pusey tracks down MacTaggart and his crew soon after their departure, and discovers that two of them have disembarked for a spot of poaching.  ‘I fail to see what’s amusing about breaking the law’, declares stuffy Pusey.  In trying to deal with the situation, he gets mixed up with the poachers and is taken into police custody, having incurred the wrath of the laird (Mark Dignam) on whose estate the poaching is going on.  The laird intervenes to lay down the law and, in a scuffle with Pusey, falls into a loch, where he thrashes about yelling that he can’t swim.  Then it’s over to Marshall to be made to look silly.

The fourth member of the puffer’s crew is adolescent Dougie (Tommy Kearins), known to all as ‘the wee boy’.  As Dougie cooks breakfast for Marshall, the boy repeatedly asks why he’s intent on trying to arrange for another vessel to take over his cargo.  When Dougie also explains that The Maggie isn’t just MacTaggart’s livelihood but his life (he was actually born on the boat), Marshall becomes reflective.  The depth of Mac’s changed outlook and yearning in Local Hero gives me goosebumps just to think of as I write this; in The Maggie, the moments that give the American pause for thought have no lasting impact.  He quickly reverts to type and must therefore be duped and humiliated once again.

He thinks he’s finally outfoxed MacTaggart when he tries to buy The Maggie, whose owner is the captain’s fearsome sister (Meg Buchanan).  Miss MacTaggart has no time for her scapegrace brother but she knows where her duty lies in the face of a takeover bid from a bullying foreigner, and turns Marshall down.  He’s baffled; ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Dougie tells him.  The eventual fate of the cargo doesn’t symbolise Marshall’s throwing overboard his materialism.  He suffers defeat after defeat without experiencing any change of heart.  The casting of Paul Douglas in what is, in terms of screen time and dialogue, the lead role, doesn’t help.  Often a good actor in essentially supporting parts, Douglas lacks the range and the audience rapport needed to engage any sympathy for Marshall’s predicament.

A resourceful home team outwits culturally destructive, self-important ‘invaders’:  the essential Ealing comedy contest couldn’t fail, in the aftermath of World War II, to have great emotional meaning to British audiences.  How consciously they related the Ealing dynamic to the country’s own recent experience is harder to say; in long retrospect, the parallels are impossible to ignore.  They’re also not easy to like in an age when localism and xenophobic insularity have come to hold increasing sway.  (Though I wasn’t keen on this set-up even before Brexit, Trump and so on:  it was back in 2012 that I saw and disliked Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore!)

There’s an additional difficulty in The Maggie.  The direction is proficient; the black-and-white cinematography by Gordon Dines includes some strangely lovely images of the figures of MacTaggart and/or Marshall against pale coastal skies; John Addison’s music gamely tries to make the narrative seem less monotonous than it is.  But as Charles Barr points out in his book Ealing Studios (first published in 1977), ‘One sometimes senses an impatience in Rose and Mackendrick at what they are doing, as if they are trapped in a backwater, and with a fiddling set of conflicts and frustrations’.  A Glasgow journalist (Andrew Keir) covering the story tells Marshall, at any early stage, that the ‘human values’ the puffers are seen to represent is a big part of the popular affection for them.  Barr is right to suggest, though, that the boy Dougie, well played by Tommy Kearins, is the only character who expresses any kind of felt commitment to the tradition of which The Maggie is supposedly part. MacTaggart, in contrast, is, as Barr says, ‘clever but in a rather sterile, short-term way’.  The clash between him and Marshall is inert and one-way traffic in two senses: Marshall makes all the noise and loses all the arguments.

5 May 2020

[1] The film was released in the US as High and Dry.