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