49. The Man in the White Suit (1951)

by Allan Fish

(UK 1951 81m) DVD1/2

Knight in shining armour

p  Sidney Cole, Michael Balcon  d  Alexander Mackendrick  w  Roger MacDougall, John Dighton, Alexander Mackendrick  ph  Douglas Slocombe ed  Bernard Gribble  m  Benjamin Frankel  art  Jim Morahan  spc  Sydney Pearson  sound  Stephen Dalby

Alec Guinness (Sidney Stratton), Joan Greenwood (Daphne Birnley), Cecil Parker (Mr Birnley), Michael Gough (Michael Corland), Vida Hope (Bertha), Howard Marion Crawford (Cranford), Ernest Thesiger (Sir John Kierlaw), Miles Malleson (tailor), Henry Mollison (Hoskins), George Benson (lodger), Edie Martin (landlady), Mandy Miller (girl),

Ealing comedies have long been a staple diet amongst fans of the so-called golden-age of British cinema, part of our national heritage to be cherished for ever more.  In truth, though they made a host of classics, including Passport to Pimlico, The Titfield Thunderbolt and Hue and Cry, only four stand up to real scrutiny over half a century on; Whisky Galore, The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets and this wonderful satire from Ealing’s greatest director, Alexander Mackendrick.  Many who associate Ealing with a cosy England that is no more often find Mackendrick’s later acerbic Sweet Smell of Success to be the antithesis of his earlier work.  In reality, there’s more than a little darkness in this earlier masterpiece, too.  David Thomson was right to point out the debts to Kafka, and it also dates a lot better than the later Boulting satires (such as I’m All Right Jack).

Sidney Stratton is a working class lad who has been thrown out of his Cambridge fellowship after some radical experiments go awry.  Finding himself eventually in Wellsborough at Birnleys, the biggest mill in the land, he manages to swindle his way into the laboratory.  When he claims to have invented an everlasting fabric, he not only antagonises the industry and unions but attracts the attention of the owner’s daughter.

The film ends with Stratton cornered by both parties in the streets at the very moment that the fabric comes apart.  The industry is saved but, rather than end on such a downer, Mackendrick shows us Guinness leaving at first dejectedly then possibly realising where he went wrong and marching off with a spring in his step.  Of course we know it can end in nothing but despair for the hero, as even if he succeeds he would have been bought off for the sake of the industry.  Yet he has no ambition but to create the fabric.  Money means nothing to him, nor do women (his white suit may even symbolise sexual purity).  Even when the delectable Greenwood is effectively prostituted to him for £5,000 by her father and his associates, he refuses to sleep with her.  With his luminous suit he really is that albino knight, later sporting a wooden sword and shield.  There’s even a wonderful touch where he escapes from Greenwood’s rooftop window by climbing down on his fabric, the very reverse of the knight climbing up Rapunzel’s hair to the high window.  We don’t know whether Greenwood loves Guinness, or really care.  My guess is that it’s platonic, as there’s no room for romance in Mackendrick’s world.

As for the performances, they’re peerless.  Guinness is superb as the idealistic Sidney and his scenes with Greenwood are a joy to behold, with the latter as deliciously self-possessed as ever.  Just check her reactions to Guinness’ scientific questions, such as that all time classic ‘get a girl into bed’ chat up line “you know about the problem of polymerising animo acid resolutes?”  Cut to her marching off to bed with two volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica under her arm.  Parker, too, is superb as her pig-headed father, Thesiger a cadaverous delight as the decrepit Kierlaw, like Professor De’ath inGormenghast.  Priceless vignettes too from Martin’s landlady (“why can’t you scientists leave things alone?), Benson’s lodger and Mollison’s shop foreman.  Not forgetting the joyous apparatus sound effects from Stephen Dalby (Dalby sound, you might say), the great script mixing scientific jargon and political agenda with subversive comedy and crisp photography (particularly in the later night-time sequences) by Douglas Slocombe.   It’s a film that may know that we are merely “flotsam floating on the floodtide of profit“, but films like this earn more than mere money.  They earn a place in the nation’s collective subconscious.