Alexander Mackendrick (1951)

What works so well is the ending – and just before the ending.  Like Whisky Galore!, the tale of Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness)  is told confidently by Alexander Mackendrick but the satire is far from subtle and the laughs, for me, are few and far between.  Sidney invents a fibre which is stainproof and indestructible, and terrifies bosses and workers alike.  The lampooning of capital and labour is vigorously obvious.  Because Sidney is unassuming, resourceful and eccentric, the Ealing ethos leads you to expect him to prevail and the clumsily defensive establishments that oppose him to get their comeuppance.  It’s not a surprise that the miraculous white fabric turns out to be unstable.  It’s visually and emotionally shocking, however, when the mob of union members and mill owners run Sidney to ground and, to their amused, astonished relief, start tearing pieces off his suit, and leave him standing in the street with no jacket or trousers.  The scene is disorienting:  a few screen seconds before the disintegration of Sidney’s suit and science, an elderly washerwoman rounds on him.  His invention will destroy her livelihood too:  ‘Why can’t you scientists leave well alone?’ she asks angrily.  With the humiliation of Sidney that follows, the maverick scientific spirit seems suddenly to have become the villain of the piece.  The film’s very last scene is as much a relief for the audience as the penultimate one was for the vested interests of the textile industry.   The voiceover of Sidney’s ex-employer, Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker), which also introduced the story, announces that the crisis is over and that ‘we’ve seen the last of Sidney Stratton’.  But Sidney leaves the factory with his lab notebook as well as his cards.  He looks at the notebook and smiles.  ‘I see!’, he exclaims and walks off jauntily en route to his next invention.  ‘At least I hope we’ve seen the last of him’, replies Birnley’s voice, now uncertain.

Alec Guinness makes that closing smile a beatific one – and he makes The Man in the White Suit.  Although he has academic qualifications as a scientist, Sidney Stratton starts the film pushing a trolley round the factory.  His rise to wealth – first because the textile magnates want to market his product then, when they realise its implications, to pay to suppress its launch – is meteoric, to put it mildly.  Guinness’s looks and voice make Sidney a distinctly middle-class worker.  He doesn’t belong in a trade union but the story wouldn’t work as well if he did:  Sidney is a man apart.  Joan Greenwood is Birnley’s daughter Daphne, who takes a fancy to Sidney (it’s reciprocated but, as usual with Guinness when he’s kissing on screen, the phrase that comes to mind is lip service).  Although Greenwood is better than usual here, her mannered expressions and readings make all the characters she plays seem insincere.  It is painful when Daphne looks scornfully at Sidney as his suit falls to pieces but the effect is momentary because you already knew from Greenwood’s playing of her that Daphne was calculating, as eager to thwart her father and his henchmen as to find true love.   Cecil Parker’s characterisation of Birnley is familiar – a thin layer of pomposity over a core of anxious cowardice – but Parker is a very likeable actor.  As a more powerfully malignant magnate, Ernest Thesiger made me laugh when he laughed – that is, when he wheezed sepulchrally.  As a younger mill owner and Daphne’s intended until Sidney appears on the scene, Michael Gough is good, as usual.  The cast also includes Miles Malleson as a tailor.  The music by Benjamin Frankel seems rather overwrought for the subject and tone of what’s on screen – although that’s preferable to the sounds of bubbling lab chemicals etc which are meant to supply a comic complement. Mackendrick wrote the screenplay with John Dighton and Roger MacDougall.

29 November 2012