Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)

Cast: Basil Radford, Catherine Lacey, Bruce Seton, Joan Greenwood, Wylie Watson, Gordon Jackson, Gabrielle Blunt, Jean Cadell, James Robertson Justice. Screenplay: Compton MacKenzie, Angus MacPhail, based on a novel by MacKenzie. Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs. Art direction: Jim Morahan. Film editing: Joseph Sterling, Charles Crichton. Music: Ernest Irving.

Alexander Mackendrick was unhappy with his first feature as a director, saying that it looked like "a home movie." But Whisky Galore! was a huge and enduring success, perhaps thanks in large part to its editors, Joseph Sterling and the uncredited Charles Crichton, who reassembled its footage and even had some additional takes shot, after initial dissatisfaction from Ealing Studios. In fact, the film helped launch Ealing as one of the major forces in what has come to be known as a kind of golden age of British film comedy, and Mackendrick went on to make two more hit comedies, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), in that era. Whisky Galore! is the story of the residents of an island in the Outer Hebrides who face calamity when wartime shipping blockades deprive them of a vital necessity, the water of life itself, whisky. And then a cargo ship carrying cases of the stuff hits the rocks nearby, is abandoned by its crew, and shunned by salvage authorities. Only the determined Capt. Waggett of the Home Guard stands between the townsfolk and the shipwreck. Waggett, played by Basil Radford, is a stern by-the-books man, despite the fact that no one, including his wife, takes him seriously. There's a subplot involving two sisters, played by Joan Greenwood and Gabrielle Blunt, and their suitors, played respectively by Bruce Seton and Gordon Jackson, but most of the film is about the clash between what authority Capt. Waggett can muster and the efforts of the people to get at the whisky.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Vera Miles, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quayle in The Wrong Man

Manny Balestrero: Henry Fonda
Rose Balestrero: Vera Miles
Frank D. O'Connor: Anthony Quayle
Det. Lt. Bowers: Harold J. Stone
Det. Matthews: Charles Cooper
Tomasini: John Heldabrand
Mama Balestrero: Esther Minciotti

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Paul Sylbert
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock's docudrama The Wrong Man is not so anomalous in his career as his rather portentous backlit introduction suggests: It may be based on an incident about a real Manny Balestrero, but there are lots of wrongly accused men in his movies, and this time he simply landed on one who happened to be an actual person. And Hitchcock's gravitation to the theme of undeserved punishment and consequent mental anguish (in this case Rose Balestrero's) was something we could expect from him if we knew of the trauma caused by the notorious childhood incident in which his domineering father had the local constabulary lock young Alfred in a jail cell for five minutes. The lesson learned was less "be a good boy" than "fear the cops," who loom large in many of his films. But the real novelty of The Wrong Man is its tone: There's virtually no leavening of gloom in the film by the usual Hitchcockian humor. Only at the very ending, when we are assured that Manny and Rose and the kids moved to Florida and lived happily ever after, is there any attempt to mitigate the rather oppressive quality of the black-and-white, location-shot tale of the struggling Balestreros. And anyone who knows much about the difficulty of "curing" depression, which Rose suffers from, is likely to feel a little skeptical about that. That said, it's a very good film, making especially fine use of Henry Fonda -- his only appearance for Hitchcock -- whose naturally haunted look is a perfect fit for the victimized Balestrero. Vera Miles, whom Hitchcock was grooming as a replacement for Grace Kelly after her recent elevation to Princess of Monaco, gives a convincing performance as Rose, managing to suggest that her depression was in the cards even before Manny's arrest. The realism of the Balestreros' financial struggle is also well-handled, as is the climactic revelation of the "right" man, accomplished by a double exposure in which he walks into and fills the image of Balestrero in closeup. For me, the other only false note besides the oversimplified happy ending is the invocation of religion as a cure to Manny's dilemma: Mama Balestrero's urging him to pray for strength and his gaze at a rather kitsch picture of Jesus is too swiftly followed by his deliverance. It turns a serious emotional and spiritual struggle into a cliché as old as the movies. The Wrong Man has been favorably compared to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), a distinction I don't think it quite merits, but then what film does?

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Opening title cards for Spellbound

Constance Petersen: Ingrid Bergman
John Ballantyne: Gregory Peck
Alexander Brulov: Michael Chekhov
Murchison: Leo G. Carroll
Mary Carmichael: Rhonda Fleming
Fleurot: John Emery
Garmes: Norman Lloyd
House Detective: Bill Goodwin

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Angus McPhail
Based on a novel by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: James Basevi, Salvador Dalí
Music: Miklós Rózsa

Although David O. Selznick held Alfred Hitchcock under contract, Hitchcock made only three films directly under his niggling presence: Rebecca (1940), Spellbound, and The Paradine Case (1947). The best of his work during this period -- Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and Notorious (1946) -- was done on loanout to other producers and studios. It was clear from the tensions between director and producer during the work on Rebecca that things would never go smoothly in their relationship. So I have a strong suspicion that Spellbound represents a sly Hitchcockian subversion of Selznick, an attempt to undermine the producer's obsessiveness by playing off Selznick's own quirks, in this case his preoccupation with psychoanalysis. Selznick notoriously gave his own analyst, May E. Romm, a screen credit as "psychiatric advisor" on the film, leading to some criticisms of her by the psychoanalytic community. Though Romm isn't credited as a writer on the film, it's thought that the title cards "explaining" psychoanalysis in the opening of Spellbound are her work. Romm and Hitchcock clashed during the filming, he studiously ignoring her suggestions and once dismissing her criticism with a characteristic "It's only a movie" retort. The result is one of Hitchcock's wackier, more improbable films, one that probably sent many in the audience away convinced that analysis was movie hokum, and not a real-life solution to mental problems. From the outset, for example, it's clear that the doctors in Green Manors, the fancy mental hospital in the film, are at least as nutty as the patients, with Dr. Fleurot constantly horndogging his beautiful colleague, Dr. Petersen, and the rest of the staff showing off their own ineptness. When the supposed Dr. Edwardes, the replacement for the retiring Dr. Murchison, arrives, he turns out to be a twitchy young man, given to fainting spells and other bits of odd behavior, but he succeeds in winning over the icy Dr. Petersen in an instant. And so on, through various bits of Hitchcockian obsession, mistaken identities, and unlikely revelations. There's the famous Dalí-designed dream sequence and Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning score, one of the first to use the eerie-sounding theremin in key passages, but it's never terribly convincing. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck are gorgeous, of course, and for once Peck doesn't seem like he was whittled out of wood -- perhaps because he and Bergman had an affair during the filming. The rest of the cast hams it up nicely, though the fact that the hammiest of them all, Michael Chekhov, got an Oscar nomination for his stereotypical shrink is lamentable. This is one of those movies that are more fun if you know all the backstories about the production.