The Man in the White Suit (1951)

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Screenonline: The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) is perhaps the most cynical, and certainly the most complex, of the Ealing comedies. It was Mackendrick's second film as director, following the surprise success of Whisky Galore! (1949), and the first of two films with Alec Guinness.

Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, mild-mannered but single-minded inventor, whose discovery - an unbreakable, dirt-repelling fabric - threatens an entire industry with ruin. It is perhaps the best of Guinness's string of fine performances for the studio.

As Sidney's only real ally, the industrialist's daughter Daphne, Joan Greenwood is, as she was in Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949) and Whisky Galore!, a very untypical Ealing woman: clever, sexy, and manipulative.
The film started life as a stage play, by Roger MacDougall, Mackendrick's cousin. Mackendrick was attracted to the play's premise, that the invention of the fabric causes managers and unions to find common cause in overcoming the threat to their interests. Like his later Ealing films, The Man in the White Suit explores a Britain in which progress is stifled by conservatism and the iron grip of the past. As Mackendrick put it,

"Each character in the story was intended as a caricature of a separate political attitude, covering the entire range from Communist, through official Trades Unionism, Romantic Individualism, Liberalism, Enlightened and Unenlightened Capitalism to Strong-arm Reaction. Even the central character was intended as a comic picture of Disinterested Science."

More than one critic has suggested that Sidney is a stand-in for Mackendrick himself, the free-thinking genius whose vision is held back by the conservatism of the studio hierarchy under Ealing head Michael Balcon. The film does have something of Ealing in its characterisations: Mackendrick reportedly guided Cecil Parker, in his portrayal of the pompous factory boss Birnley, to "model yourself on Mick [Balcon]".

But Sidney's unworldly innocence disguises his disregard for the real social consequences of his actions. The film's most poignant moment comes near the end, when Sidney, pursued by an angry mob, runs into his aged landlady, Mrs Watson (Edie Martin), carrying a basket of laundry. Sidney pleads with her for something to hide his suit, but she rejects him, asking, "Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing, when there's no washing to do?" Her plea gives Sidney pause but, at the end, he is back to his selfish dreaming.

Alexander Mackendrick: Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1912 and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. In the 1930s, as an art director for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising firm, he designed layouts for a variety of clients including Phillips in Eindhoven, where he worked with George Pal, the Hungarian animator. When the war in Europe broke out, J. Walter Thompson acquired the Ministry of Information as a client to work on propaganda related projects.

In 1941 Mackendrick was sent to North Africa, then Italy as part of the psychological warfare division shooting newsreels and documentary coverage as well as working on leaflets and radio news for the Allied commando effort. When Rome was liberated in 1943, Mackendrick was made director of the film unit and one of the projects he approved was Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), a film that owes much to its documentary footage. In 1946 he was offered a contract with Ealing Studios, a relatively emerging production company that brought hope for Britain's movie culture by dominating the 1950s with its peculiar brand of comedy.

At the time, British cinema was an unremarkable byproduct of the documentary movement of the 1930s and consisted mostly of literary adaptations. Some comedies were popular, particularly those starring George Formby and other vaudeville mainstays. The wartime population regarded other movies – those incorporating realist techniques from the documentary movement – with sober acceptance. This naturalistic but dull style hindered any progress in the cinema's evolution.

What Ealing Studios brought in was quiet revolution. Films at Ealing were carefully guided under Michael Balcon, the head of production, who exercised authority with a trusting, liberal generosity that challenged the weak traditions of previous filmmaking. The studio was increasingly becoming known for its collegiate atmosphere and democratic, round table conferences that Balcon held, where ideas would be greeted with a kind of paternal affection.

“There are about half a dozen people who claim responsibility for [Mackendrick's arrival at Ealing]” (2), Mackendrick's wife Hilary maintains, yet it seems the circumstances were just of chance. His first job at Ealing was as designer of 'set-ups', or more detailed storyboards that included the characters in proportion to the framing of shots. He then moved on to fully storyboarding and cowriting Saraband for Dead Lovers (Basil Dearden, 1948), along with working on additional dialogue and directing the second unit on The Blue Lamp (Dearden, 1949). In 1948, he was offered a chance to direct the unusual comedy Whisky Galore!. Mackendrick's contribution to Ealing would prove enormous, even if his track record of films would be less so.

Mackendrick's second film, The Man In The White Suit (1951), is the best of his Ealing comedies. A scientist currently working as a lab janitor discovers the formula for an indestructible type of fiber but finds himself under opposition from both the unions and executives of the textile industry. The story, based on a play written by Mackendrick's cousin Roger MacDougall, owes little to its source material. The issue that the director was concerned with was the polemics of industry and its responsibilities. The result is a deeply pessimistic portrait that challenges values and obligations of business and society, and is not so much a light comedy as a cautionary tale to the excess of idealism. Before facing white and blue collar opposing forces, the inventor, Sidney (Alec Guinness), is initially keen on the benefits of his discovery. Like the naive Waggett in Whisky Galore!, the consequences of one character's inexperience results in changes that affect the whole community.

Stylistically, the movie pays small homage to Fritz Lang, and is strikingly photographed by frequent collaborator Douglas Slocombe. Sidney whips through dark alleyways, wearing the pristine suit, and several union members dirtily paw at it, the expressionist claustrophobia apparent. Stony black-suited monolithic executives also hover over him throughout the film, observing his moves with a jealous superiority reminiscent of the vigilante jury from M (1931).

The casting of Alec Guinness as Sidney was a coup for Mackendrick, as his indistinctive appearance permits him to be regarded more as a vehicle of idealism, untouched by pressures of consumer society. The austere businessmen of the textile industry portray a ripe parody of establishment as fatuous capitalists. They are afraid of change and attempt to hold on to legacy and tradition; essentially, the crumbling facade of English imperialism. But even Sidney, maladroit and innocent, is doomed to failure. His priorities shift throughout the picture: idealism turns into opportunity and action, reality becomes experience, but he remains ambiguous.

The characters however, are never polar opposites, and only divide in matters of personal ethics. Sidney, Mackendrick emphasized, is not “pure” (3), and is as devious and self-interested as the industry men who try to stop him. This is the most destructive quality of his innocence. He doesn't have the experience of the executives to realize the effect on the community. Perhaps it is his childlike approach to the situation that warrants sympathy, and a quest for some kind of absolute. But there is no universal answer. The result becomes cynicism and frustration in the mechanics of a comedy.

Mackendrick bio: Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 8 September 1912, the only child of a shipbuilding draughtsman and civil engineer, Francis Robert Mackendrick, and his wife Martha, who had migrated to the USA from their native Glasgow in the previous year. When Alexander was only six years old, his father died in the post-World War I influenza epidemic, and his mother, attempting to pursue a career as a dress designer, gave the boy over to his grandfather, who took him back to Glasgow in 1919. He was never reunited with his mother, and later in life realised that his childhood had been lonely and rather unhappy.

After attending Hillhead High School between 1919 and 1926, Mackendrick enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art for three years before moving to London to take up a job at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT). He was soon promoted from layout artist to art director and he remained at JWT throughout the 1930s. Characteristically, he said of the early years of his career that his training in advertising had been invaluable, "though it's an industry I in effect despise". During this period he co-wrote a script with his cousin Roger MacDougall, which was bought by Associated-British and released under the title Midnight Menace (d. Sinclair Hill, 1937). Between 1936 and 1938, he also scripted and storyboarded five cinema commercials for Horlicks, which were shot in Technicolor by the stop-puppet animator George Pal.

During the early years of World War II, Mackendrick scripted and storyboarded wartime propaganda films for a new animation unit at JWT headed by John Halas and Joy Batchelor. In 1942, he and MacDougall set up their own production company, where Mackendrick cut his directorial teeth with three ninety-second 'instructional' films to be inserted into the Pathé Gazette newsreel. In the following year, he travelled to Algiers and Italy with the Army Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), drawing cartoons for Allied propaganda leaflets. After the fall of Rome he and the art director Peter Proud directed two documentaries, I granai del popolo (a propaganda piece aimed at persuading Italian farmers to make surplus grain available for general distribution) and Le fosse Ardeatine (on the aftermath of the Nazis' massacre of partisans at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome).

When the war ended, Mackendrick set up Merlin Productions with MacDougall, making documentaries for the Ministry of Information. When the company ran into financial difficulties, Mackendrick sought work at Ealing Studios and in 1946 was taken on as scriptwriter and production designer on Basil Dearden's Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948). This was the start of a new phase in his career: he stayed at Ealing for nine years, directing five films, establishing himself as a key figure in Britain's post-war film industry and acquiring a considerable international reputation.

The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mackendrick's next assignment, was based on a play by MacDougall about the invention of an indestructible cloth by a scientist working for a textile mill: in the film the scientist, Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness), is an idealist who regards his invention as potentially revolutionary. One of Mackendrick's dangerous innocents, Stratton fails to take account of the less positive aspects of his brainchild; and it is his lack of awareness that provides the source of the comedy. In Charles Barr's view, "perhaps the most intelligent of British films [and] certainly one of the most complex", The Man in the White Suit is stamped with its director's mordant humour and displays degrees of irony and ambiguity exceptional even for Mackendrick.

Roger Macdougall, cousin of Alexander Mackendrick worked in films first as composer, then writer; at Ealing as writer intermittently between 1939 and 1953, meanwhile working for several years in the 1940's as writer and director of documentaries for his own Merlin productions. Continued writing for the stage, occasionally for films; The Mouse that Roared (1959).

Joan Greenwood: Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#63).

Encyclopedia of British Film: The irresistible leading lady of some of the most enduring British films, seductive of voice, face and figure, searching the language - and indeed the world - for booby traps, Greenwood's performance record must be nearly unrivalled among British leading ladies. RADA-trained and on stage from 1938 (delectably malicious as Hattie in The Grass Is Greener, 1959; sharply ambiguous in The Chalk Garden, 1971), she was in films from 1940.

She was one of The Gentle Sex (1943) celebrated in Leslie Howard's film, was a sympathetic helper for The October Man (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1947), and a doomed Sophie Dorothea in Saraband for Dead Lovers (d. Basil Dearden, 1948), but it was as the female lead in a series of benchmark comedies that she made herself indispensable to British films.

In Whisky Galore! (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949), she is the drily beguiling Peggy and the wonderfully minxish Sibella respectively; she deflects Alec Guinness from his experiments in The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951, 'What could I do?' she asks, as if it wasn't obvious) and she is, in her way, as imperishably Gwendolyn as Edith Evans is Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (d. Anthony Asquith, 1951).

She did better in America than some of her contemporaries (cf. Moonfleet, d. Fritz Lang, 1955, and Stage Struck, d. Sidney Lumet, 1958). She played character roles back in Britain but remained a star till the end, which came after Little Dorrit (d. Christine Edzard, 1988), as Mrs Clennam, and it was good to see her brilliant at the finish. There was some TV and stage work but she is above all a British film star, the genuine article.

Never, it seems, very ambitious, she had a late but happy marriage to actor André Morell and worked only fitfully after that.

Alec Guinness, best known and most loved British actor of the 20th century, made 77 films over nearly 50 years, beginning in 1946 and 1948 with David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and continuing beyond the Star Wars Trilogy to A Passage to India in 1984 and later films for television . He brought to the screen timeless qualities of comedy brilliance, an individual sense of the eccentric and the macabre, and an inner reality of character which has rarely been surpassed. Although he began as a stage actor, the cinema transformed his career, proclaiming his phenomenal range and bringing him world-wide recognition. He became the supreme entertainer about whom there always remained something unknown: this sense of an impenetrable secret, of something deliberately hidden - also maintained carefully in his personal life - became the key to his continuing fascination. All his films are full of his special genius.

After the two Dickens films, when Ealing Studios resumed film-making after the war, Guinness quickly rose to become its leading star with Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob. He stayed mainly with Ealing for the next five or so years, but came to tire of the idea, projected in the comedies, of himself as the master of a hundred faces. From then on his range broadened to central dramatic roles, saints, men of genius, leaders, spies and master-criminals, all distinct and observed with his ironic sense of detachment.

Guinness was always a very subtle performer, with a meticulous attention to detail, and an extraordinary power of concentration. As his talent and career burgeoned he became not so much interested in big effects, but paring away everything that was inessential. His mastery of expressing hidden feeling, of being tortured and of mental suffering, emerged fully in The Prisoner, in which he played the persecuted Roman Catholic Cardinal, and in The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he deservedly won an Oscar for best actor. In many of his films there emerges the sense of a personal quest, of a search for identity, as he successively disappeared and re-emerged completely disguised as fictitious people, or as, say, Hitler, Freud, Charles I or Marcus Aurelius. His Fagin, with its ferocious display of evil, was censored in parts of the U.S.A. for being anti-Semitic; his Fuhrer provoked a ban in Israel for its human sympathy- but he maintained in both cases he never minded thoroughly evil people, whom he found more interesting to act than good ones.

While he was occasionally courted by avant-garde and art directors, he stayed in the mainstream of popular cinema, although he occasionally engaged in ventures of his own, for instance when he produced, and played Gulley Jimson, in his own adaptation of The Horse’s Mouth. Given his five years wartime experience in the British navy he played many and varied serving officers, the best of which was the hard-swearing, hard drinking Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory. You rarely see Guinness, in this extraordinary wide variety of films in the NFT programme, letting himself rip, but Tunes of Glory is the glorious exception. With the advent of the British obsession with spies it took little for Guinness to become supreme in this field as Smiley in the two Lé Carre series made for television.

Mackendrick's first film at Ealing, Whisky Galore! (1949), ranks high among the comedy classics of British cinema. Based on Compton Mackenzie's novel about a shipwrecked cargo of whisky off the Hebridean islands, the film focuses on disagreements between the inhabitants of the island of Todday and officialdom (in the form of the Englishman in charge of the island's Home Guard) about what should be done with the whisky. In a variant of a theme which was to surface repeatedly in Mackendrick's work, the Englishman represents Innocence, the islanders Experience. But in Mackendrick's world, oppositions are rarely clear-cut and humour is always double-edged: in Whisky Galore! innocence is potentially dangerous, experience devious and exploitative.

Two qualities distinguish Guinness as unique. First the so-called anonymous face, sometimes defined as that of the man in the street, yet which can turn into anyone’s: as George Lucas said of him, 'Like a chameleon, Alec has a lot of different shades, different colours and different characters'. Second, he always avoided finding the permanent, comfortable role. No striking effects, no direct emotional statements, an eavesdropping style easy to overlook.
-- Garry O’Connor, Author of 'Alec Guinness the Unknown: A Life

Household fame, though, came with films. An extra in Evensong (d. Victor Saville, 1934), he didn't film again until his beautifully exact Herbert Pocket in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), followed by his controversially repulsive Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948) and the series of Ealing comedies with which, to this day, his name is most tenaciously associated. (Except of course by the very young who know him only as Obi-Wan in Star Wars (US, d. George Lucas, 1977), for which he famously took a percentage and needed never to work again.)

There are seven of these comedies, most memorable of which are the immaculate Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949), in which he played eight members of a ducal family, The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), as the mild bank clerk dreaming larcenously of gold bars, The Man in the White Suit (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1951), as an inventor in the grip of an idée fixe, and The Ladykillers (d. Mackendrick, 1955), as the unctuous, snaggle-toothed leader of a gang of incompetent crooks. In 1989, he claimed never to feel comfortable playing characters too like himself, and most of these films allow physical disguise to complement the inner obsessions. His own physical appearance as a young man was pleasantly ordinary rather than glamorously film starrish.

Ealing Studios can claim to be the oldest film studio in the world. The stages and offices are steeped in history having survived the onset of the talkies, two world wars and the more recent technological advances in film and TV.

Will Barker, a pioneer of British cinema, originally acquired the site in 1902. Basil Dean, owner of Associated Talking Pictures took over from Barker in the early 1930s and Ealing Studios was established. In 1938, Michael Balcon joined Dean as Head of Production. The golden era of Ealing Studios had begun.

This fabulous period of creativity would last until the late 1950s. Films like the Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets were created and formed the pinnacle of the most astonishing British film production ever seen.

The BBC bought the Studios in 1959 and they spent the next 20 years creating television productions from Ealing Studios such as Colditz, The Singing Detective and Fortunes of War.

The Studios were acquired in mid-2000 by Uri Fruchtmann, Barnaby Thompson, Harry Handelsman and John Kao. Together these partners aim to rebuild the Studios with a vision that brings film, technology and property expertise together in order to revive and continue the outstanding quality of past productions made here at Ealing.

Ealing Studios has recently accommodated high profile films including An Ideal Husband, Notting Hill, Star Wars – Episode 2, Lucky Break and The Importance of Being Earnest. Recent television productions include The Royle Family (Granada), Bedtime (HatTrick), Randall and Hopkirk Deceased (Ghost) and Emma Brody (20 Century Fox).

More on Ealing: It was a place in which the editor was highly regarded, and nearly all Ealing's directors had served earlier in the cutting-rooms - Charles Crichton, Charles Frend, Henry Cornelius, Thorold Dickinson, Robert Hamer, Leslie Norman, Michael Truman and Seth Holt were all former film editors. A much smaller number had graduated from screenwriting - this group included Basil Dearden, Harry Watt and Alexander Mackendrick. But significantly no actors were ever elevated to a directorial role. Ealing operated almost on a repertory basis, with a number of reliable performers appearing again and again, no doubt attracted as much by the idea of regular work as of contributing to the product of a much-favoured British studio. But Ealing, good as it was for reputations, was no place in which to get rich.

Sidney Stratton Lives! PALM SPRINGS, Calif., Feb. 12, 2002 - To show that nanotechnology is more than hype, David Soane stands before an audience of about 250 people at a nanotech investing forum, and holds up a pair of beige cotton slacks.

Molecular structures that are part of the Nano-Texprocess are much smaller than a grain of sand or even a virus. That prevents the human eye, or touch, from detecting even a minor difference between Nano-Tex fabric and regular fabric, the company says.
"This is a pair of pants," Soane says casually. "You can buy them in any Eddie Bauer," the retail chain with a store even in Palm Desert, Calif. That's not far from the table where Soane picks up a glass with liquid in it.

"Imagine you're at a cocktail party and you have red wine..." Soane empties the glass on the fabric. The liquid rolls off. "One hundred percent cotton," the Berkeley chemical engineering professor-turned-entrepreneur says triumphantly.