by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s San Diego Vintage Sci-Fi film screening (http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of two acknowledged
classics with only a peripheral relationship to the science-fiction genre: Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the
White Suit (1951) and Walter Lang’s Desk
Set (1957). The Man in the White
Suit is one of those oddball comedies made
by Britain’s Ealing Studios in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, most of them
(including this one) with Alec Guinness as the male lead (though one of the few
that didn’t feature Guinness,
1949’s Passport to Pimlico, may
be the best of the lot: fed up with the continuation of British rationing four
years after World War II ended, a small neighborhood in London discovers an old
medieval land grant that allows them to declare themselves the independent
duchy of Burgundy — a premise that in the era of Brexit and Trump’s border wall
demand would probably seem even funnier than it did either when the film was
made or in 2002, when I saw it). At the time Guinness was known almost
exclusively as a comedian, and he had a particular admiration for Stan Laurel
(of Laurel and Hardy fame) that comes through very strongly in this film — the
next year he would play the comic-relief role of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at
the Old Vic and acknowledge that he had borrowed a lot of his movements and
gestures from Laurel.
Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, research chemist at a
succession of textile mills in Sussex (he keeps getting fired when his
researches get to the point of threatening life and limb) who’s reduced to
taking a job at the loading dock at the Birnley mill, owned by Alan Birnley
(Cecil Parker). Birnley’s daughter Daphne (a young Joan Greenwood) is more or
less in love with Sidney, who seems torn between her and the butch co-worker,
Bertha (a marvelous performance by Vida Hope), who’s also a militant Leftist
and shows Sidney the ropes of his proletarian job while also berating him for
not taking the tea break that’s offered him: “We had to fight for it!” she says. Sidney eventually talks his way
into taking over the research lab at Birnley’s, where he invents a new miracle
fiber that never wears out and repels dirt. He believes he’s done the business,
its workers and the world a great service by inventing clothes that can be worn
forever, but a combination of mill owners led by Sir John Kierlaw (Ernest
Thesiger, older and more crochety than he’d been as Dr. Pretorious in The
Bride of Frankenstein but still a welcome
sight) immediately realize that a cloth that lasts forever will kill their
business because no one will ever need to buy new clothes again. The workers at
the plant also want to see the
process suppressed because it will kill the jobs — and even Mrs. Watson (Edie
Martin), the sympathetic landlady at the boarding house where Sidney lives,
asks him, “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of
washing when there’s no washing to do?”
The members of the consortium lock
Sidney into a room and plan to hold him there until he signs a contract
agreeing to let them mothball his invention forever in return for a payment,
and Birnley sends his daughter Daphne into Stratton’s improvised prison to
seduce him into accepting the deal — only Daphne helps Stratton escape instead.
Stratton flees the assembled forces of capital, labor and side contractors wearing a dazzlingly bright white
suit made from his super-fabric — he explains that the same properties that lead
it to repel dirt also make it repellent to dyes, so when the fabric is finally
produced color will have to be added to it earlier in the manufacturing process
— although, this being a slapstick comedy as well as a political and economic
satire, in a case of mistaken identity the combined forces of capital, labor
and side contractors end up chasing another man wearing a white suit, this one made from
ordinary fabric. When they finally do catch up with Stratton his suit starts unraveling — an outcome signaled
to us when his assistant back at
the lab, Wilkins (Harold Goodwin), noticed the threads on the spool left over
after they wove the cloth for Stratton’s super-suit are starting to split apart
and look like a very large hair-ball. When the people chasing Stratton finally
catch up with him the same starts happening to his suit — it gives off
unpleasant-looking bits of fluff that look like someone sliced open a couch and
started taking out the batting. Everyone except Stratton heaves a sigh of
relief that his invention’s threat to the established economic order is over,
and the film closes with Alan Birnley resuming the voice-over narration with
which he began the film and announcing that “calm and sanity have returned to
the textile industry.” The Man in the White Suit was based on a play by Roger MacDougall — though the
story contains so many locations and is based on so many chase scenes featuring
both actors and camera moving through them — and the screenplay is credited to
MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick, the last of whom also
directed.
Mackendrick had one of the most checkered directorial careers in film
history, making a number of quirky masterpieces, most of which expressed a
cynical attitude towards establishments of all kinds: in 1957 he made his first
American film, Sweet Smell of Success, a great film that seems almost to choke on its own relentless
negativity in which virtually no one is likable (which makes it seem modern,
come to think of it: the idea that a film should have a central character the
audience can root for sometimes seems as old-fashioned as the idea that a film
should be silent), and in 1965 he turned around and took on a potentially
sentimental story called Sammy Going South (about a young British orphan stranded in Africa who determines to
traverse the entire north-south length of the continent to reach his only
surviving relatives in Durban, South Africa) and made a beautiful, surprisingly
edgy movie out of it called A Boy Ten Feet Tall that gave Edward G. Robinson (as a trader who helps
the kid on part of his journey) probably the best role he had in the last
decade of his life. The Man in the White Suit is a bitter, stinging satire — though, as with a lot
of Ealing’s films, its social comment is leavened by the sheer driven lunacy of
the story and much of the acting — and, like a lot of the Ealing movies, its
satire rings even truer now than
it did in 1951, especially with the dominance of computers and other electronic
products in which obsolescence is built in from the get-go at the design table.
My computer keeps sending me nasty messages that I’m using an out-of-date
operating system or an out-of-date browser or some other piece of out-of-date
software, aimed at getting me to buy new software (and, of course, a new
computer that will run it all); the idea that anything should be “built to last” has gone the way of the
horse and buggy, trampled by the relentless pursuit of profit and its eternal
demand that consumers have to be made constantly dissatisfied (to the point
where some computer programs simply have “terminator” codes that render them
unusable at all after a certain period of time!). The idea that something can
be “classic,” that it can “stand the test of time,” is not only opposed but
actually considered dangerous by people who run businesses today — and in
skewering that attitude The Man in the White Suit is a more effective satire now than it was in 1951!
