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 Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)

The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)

Cast: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough, Ernest Thesiger, Howard Marion-Crawford, Henry Morrison, Vida Hope. Screenplay: Roger MacDougall, John Dighton, Alexander Mackendrick. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Art direction: Jim Morahan. Film editing: Bernard Gribble.
Music: Benjamin Frankel.

When I first saw The Man in the White Suit many years ago, I thought it was a satire on the short-sightedness of those who resist scientific and technological progress. But now, after having worked in an industry threatened with obsolescence by technology, I have much greater sympathy for the film's ostensible villains, capital and labor, who try to suppress the innovation discovered by Alec Guinness's Sidney Stratton. He develops a "miracle fabric" that repels dirt and is seemingly indestructible. At first, the idea is welcomed by textile manufacturers who hope to obliterate the competition with the product. But it doesn't take long for the manufacturers to realize that an indestructible fabric would eventually put them out of business. At the same time, the labor unions realize that it would also put them out of work. It's not hard to see the parallels to our own experiences after the revolution brought about by computer technology, but in 1951 that was nothing more than a glimmer in the eyes of the fathers of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So be careful about what's funny today. It may be your nightmare tomorrow.

The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith, 1952)

Dorothy Tutin and Joan Greenwood in The Importance of Being Earnest

Ernest Worthing: Michael Redgrave
Algernon Moncrieff: Michael Denison
Lady Bracknell: Edith Evans
Gwendolen Fairfax: Joan Greenwood
Cecily Cardew: Dorothy Tutin
Miss Prism: Margaret Rutherford
Canon Chasuble: Miles Malleson
Merriman: Aubrey Mather

Director: Anthony Asquith
Screenplay: Anthony Asquith
Based on a play by Oscar Wilde
Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson
Art direction: Carmen Dillon
Film editing: John D. Guthridge
Costume design: Beatrice Dawson
Music: Benjamin Frankel

For its marvelous sendup of the drawing room drama, the intricate craftsmanship of its plot, and the unparalleled wit of its dialogue, The Importance of Being Earnest has been called a "perfect" play. But perfection in the theater doesn't readily translate to perfection on the screen, so some of the fluidity and buoyancy of Oscar Wilde's play is lost in Anthony Asquith's otherwise admirable film. Asquith's screenplay chops up and relocates parts of some of the play's acts, and it provides a theatrical frame for the action: people taking their seats in the box of a Victorian theater and the curtain rising as a woman raises her opera glasses to view the performance. Asquith immediately breaks from that frame to show Ernest in his bath, a scene that doesn't exist in the play and seems to be in the film only to demonstrate that the screenwriter has "opened it up" cinematically. But almost immediately we are back in the confines of Wilde's original, as Algernon arrives and the exposition begins. The frame is a nice little trick on Asquith's part, but it feels gratuitous. The play's the thing, and for the most part Asquith sticks to it. The chief glory of his film lies in his cast, most of whom had almost certainly performed their roles on stage, given the centrality of Wilde's play in the British repertoire. And although the men are perfectly fine in their roles, the women are what matter in the film: a quartet of perfectly cast, impeccably skilled performers. Lady Bracknell typically steals every production of The Importance of Being Earnest, and Edith Evans almost makes the role her own forever -- though the part has been played by equally formidable actresses like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith -- with her imperious delivery. No one has ever surpassed her in summoning up the full diapason while delivering the line "A handbag?" Nor is it possible to imagine a more perfect embodiment of Miss Prism than Margaret Rutherford, who makes it quite clear that the character was entirely capable of placing the novel in the pram and the baby in the valise. Gwendolen and Cecily are not so distinctly drawn in the script: Both are cunning ditzes, vehicles for epigrams, satires on girlishness. But Joan Greenwood and Dorothy Tutin give each a discrete characterization, Tutin with her sunny pretense at naïveté, Greenwood with her mastery of a voice that can go from purr to growl in nothing flat. If I give Greenwood the edge, it's only because of the way her slight lisp makes hearing her say the name Cecily such a delight.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

Dennis Price and Joan Greenwood in Kind Hearts and Coronets

Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini: Dennis Price
Edith D'Ascoyne: Valerie Hobson
Sibella: Joan Greenwood
Ethelred, Lord Ascoyne/Rev. Lord Henry/ Gen. Lord Rufus/Admiral Lord Horatio/Young Ascoyne/Young Henry/Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne: Alec Guinness
Louis's Mother: Audrey Fildes
The Hangman: Miles Malleson
The Prison Governor: Clive Morton
Lionel: John Penrose
Lord High Steward: Hugh Griffith

Director: Robert Hamer
Screenplay: Robert Hamer, John Dighton
Based on a novel by Roy Horniman
Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Art direction: William Kellner
Film editing: Peter Tanner
Costume design: Anthony Mendleson
Music: Ernest Irving

Kind Hearts and Coronets is best known for Alec Guinness's tour de force as the entire D'Ascoyne family, but that's hardly the greatest of pleasures the film affords. Dennis Price's performance as the suavely lethal Louis is as much a demonstration of how to act sophisticated comedy as one could wish, and who can resist Joan Greenwood as Sibella, especially in hats that seem to contain an entire florist's shop? It evokes her definitive Gwendolen Fairfax in Anthony Asquith's 1952 filming of The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, Oscar Wilde's play is the essential background reference for Robert Hamer's screenplay -- it apparently also influenced the novel on which the film is based -- and you hear Wilde's voice in such lines as Mazzini's "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms." Hamer's staging also provides the necessary distancing from Mazzini's murders, as in the scene in which he offs Young Henry D'Ascoyne: While Mazzini is taking tea with Edith in the garden we hear a whump that neither character acknowledges as Henry's darkroom explodes with him in it. Then smoke begins to arise beyond the garden wall, and Mazzini comments that someone must be burning leaves. Not this time of year, Edith replies, and Mazzini rushes off to "investigate" what he knows has happened. Kind Hearts and Coronets seems to me the best of all the classic British comedies of the late 1940s and the 1950s.