In the years after “The War,” Britons got back to indulging the quirkier aspects of a national character that “Keep Calm and Carry On” had superceded, at least as far as “Fritz” and his “Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe” gang were concerned.
The Ealing comedies of that era were — to a one — twee and eccentric, working class, government baiting and posh-puncturing. Films from “Hue and Cry” to “The Maggie,” “Whisky Galore!” and “Kind Hearts and Coronets” could be dark (“The Ladykillers”) or simply liberating (“Passport to Pimlico”). But out of the bombed-out ruins of a broke country and vanishing empire they bubbled over with self-mocking wit and that peculiar sense of playfulness that produced Noel Coward, Peter Sellers and Monty Python.
No other place on Earth could have made “The Titfield Thunderbolt,” or found the fun embodied by that silly, alliterative title.
Alexander Mackendrick (“Sweet Smell of Success,” “Whisky Galore!”) was behind the camera for 1951’s Oscar-nominated “The Man in the White Suit,” a screwy satire of capital and labor that could not be more British.
It’s built around British bourgeouisie, Cockney union members, titles and old money, all of them flummoxed and all but undone by a single-minded practioner of that grand British tradition of tinkering.
Our title character is a Cambridge-trained chemist (Alex Guinness) who flits around the periphery of Manchester, in the Lancashire heart of Britain’s aged, Industrial Revolution era textile industry.
Sidney Stratton has had many jobs and been “sacked” from all of them. So he takes janitorial work just to be around the labs of these venerated mills so that he can secretly fund his tinkering on a new kind of polymer fiber in the golden age of Rayon and Nylon.
We see him skitter out of Corland’s (Michael Gough, later “Alfred” to Bale’s Batman) textile works and over to Birnley’s (Cecil Parker), who just happens to be the father of the fair Daphne (Joan Greenwood of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” and “Tom Jones”).
Mr. Corland would love to marry Daphne, and get an infusion of cash from Mr. Birnley. But his books show all these unexplained expenditures. That queers the courtship and the investment. Sidney, the source of those expenditures, sneaks out just before he’s discovered.
Before he knows it, Mr. Birnley’s lab is running up bills for this chemical or that chemical-manipulating gadget. Sidney is at it again, bluffing the lab techs and their boss with his education and monomaniacal self-confidence.
Everything he orders, every experiment he carries out, every assistant he waylays or boss he buffaloes is explained away with “It’s very important” and “It’s really quite simple.“
Nobody wants to admit they don’t quite know what he’s on about.
When he shouts “I’ve DONE it,” nobody knows what he’s done. Or who he is. Or that he’s spent all their money on it.
“You can’t fire ME! I don’t WORK here!”
What he’s “done” is invent a long-chain molecule that produces thread that repels dirt and stains and is so indestructible that it takes a blowtorch to cut it.
“It never gets dirty and it lasts forever,” the taken-with-Sidney Daphne translates. “The whole world is going to bless you!”
But what about the textile moguls who make all their money on customers replacing clothes and cloths that wear out? What about their labor force? Or say, the labor force of cheap labor textile-dependent India? What’s Sidney’s poor landlady/washerwoman (Edie Martin)to do “eef they’s no washin’?
The comedy in the early acts of this film, based on an unproduced play by Mackendrick’s cousin, is slapstick of a misdirection variety — Sidney eluding discovery, droll Daphne figuring it out, Sidney tumbling as he chases the rich girl who might “out him down in her MG roadster.
Guinness, coming into his own as a comic actor, is in a fine, daft dudgeon. He’s given an able assist in the “cute” department by an uncredited sound designer. Mary Habberfield gives Sidney’s DIY bubbling, gurgling chemical reflux apparataus musical toots and burps courtesy of blurts on the tuba and bassoon.
The pace picks up and the satire kicks in for the film’s last act, as Sidney is confronted by a consortium led by the Scrooge-in-a-vintage-Rolls Royce Sir John Kierlaw (Ernest Thesiger), a crone who won’t have his textile empire undone by “progress.”
The labor activist (Vida Hope) who rooms in the same boarding house as Sidney and develops a crush on him as she helps him stand up to capital and enforces his “tea breaks,” even though he’s basically working for nothing in his pursuit of “progress,” is crushed.
“TEA BREAK! We had to FIGHT for it!” And now he’s about to do away with all their jobs-for-life in short order.
The cast of character players make these workers and oligarchs, scientists and idealists feel lived-in and real.
And Guinness, dashing about, tumbling down a street or Bat-climbing down the side of a building thanks to a thread from his “indestuctible” invention, looks very good in a white suit.
That central sight gag plays on what the late writer and New York man about town/dandy Tom Wolfe used to say about his signature white suits. “You have to have three of them” in order to be recognized for having one.
What’s the point of wearing something that shows you never have to dirty yourself with anything resembling labor or effort, if it’s chemically incapable of getting dirty?
“The Man in the White Suit” plays as more slight these days, even if the satire still stings. It was never the laugh riot of “Whisky Galore!” or “The Ladykillers.” But its delights are still there in its shrewd observations about the shared interests of capital and labor, the fear of “progress” and mistrust of impersonal “science” and its ability to always move humanity forward.
And the Old School Englishness of it all still resonates, even in a Britain marked by 75 years of change, immigration, loss of empire, evolution and “progress.” Maybe they don’t “keep calm” the way they used to. But there’s still something twee about their taxis, their phone boxes, their tea and tea breaks and their tinkerers and hobbyists.
Rating: “approved”
Cast: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Ernest Thesiger, Vida Hope and Michael Gough
Credits: Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, scripted by Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick, based on a play by MacDougall. An Ealing release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.
Running time: 1:26
