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Alexander Mackendrick | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1912-09-08)September 8, 1912 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | December 22, 1993(1993-12-22) (aged 81) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Education | Hillhead High School |
| Alma mater | Glasgow School of Art |
| Occupations |
|
| Years active | 1937–1969 (filmmaking) 1969–1993 (academic) |
| Spouse(s) | Eileen Ashcroft (1934–1943) Hilary Lloyd (1948–1993) |
| Relatives | Roger MacDougall (cousin)[1] |
Alexander Mackendrick (September 8, 1912 – December 22, 1993) was an American-born Scottish[2] film director and screenwriter. He directed nine feature films between 1949 and 1967, before retiring from filmmaking to become an influential professor at theCalifornia Institute of the Arts.[2]
Born to Scottish immigrant parents inBoston, he was raised inGlasgow from the age of six. He began making television commercials before moving intopost-production editing and directing films, most notably forEaling Studios where his films includeWhisky Galore! (1949),The Man in the White Suit (1951) - which earned him anOscar nomination forBest Screenplay,The Maggie (1954), andThe Ladykillers (1955).
In 1957, Mackendrick directed his first American filmSweet Smell of Success, which was a critical and commercial success. However, his directing career declined throughout the following decade, and he was fired or replaced from several projects, owing in part to his perfectionist approach to filmmaking.[3]
Mackendrick retired from directing in the late 1960s after completingA High Wind in Jamaica (1965) andDon't Make Waves (1967), becoming the founding Dean (and later a Professor) of the CalArts School of Film/Video.[4]
He was born on September 8, 1912, the only child of Francis and Martha Mackendrick who had emigrated to the United States fromGlasgow in 1911.[5] His father was aship builder and a civil engineer. When Mackendrick was six, his father died ofinfluenza as a result of theinfluenza pandemic that swept the world just afterWorld War I. His mother, in desperate need of work, decided to become a dress designer. In order to pursue that decision, it was necessary for Martha MacKendrick to hand her only son over to his grandfather, who took young MacKendrick back toScotland in early 1919 when he was six years old.[6] Mackendrick never saw or heard from his mother again.
Mackendrick had a sad and lonely childhood.[7] He attendedHillhead High School in Glasgow from 1919 to 1926 and then went on to spend three years at theGlasgow School of Art. In the early 1930s, MacKendrick moved to London to work as an art director for the advertising firmJ. Walter Thompson. Between 1936 and 1938, Mackendrick scripted five cinema commercials. He later reflected that his work in the advertising industry was invaluable, in spite of his extreme dislike of the industry itself. MacKendrick wrote his first film script with his cousin and close friend,Roger MacDougall.[1] It was bought byAssociated British and later released, after script revisions, asMidnight Menace (1937).[7]
At the start of theSecond World War, Mackendrick was employed by theMinistry of Information making British propaganda films. In 1942, he went toAlgiers and then to Italy, working with theBritish Army'sPsychological Warfare Division. He then shot newsreels, documentaries, made leaflets, and did radio news. In 1943, he became the director of the film unit and approved the production ofRoberto Rossellini's earlyneorealist film,Rome, Open City (1945).[8]
After the war, Mackendrick and Roger MacDougall set up Merlin Productions, where they produced documentaries for the Ministry of Information. Merlin Productions soon proved financially unviable. In 1946 Mackendrick joinedEaling Studios, originally as a scriptwriter and production designer, where he worked for nine years and directed five films made at Ealing;Whisky Galore! (US:Tight Little Island, 1949),The Man in the White Suit (1951),Mandy (1952),The Maggie (US:High and Dry, 1954) andThe Ladykillers (1955), the first two and the last being among the best known of Ealing's films.[7]
Mackendrick often spoke of his dislike of the film industry and decided to leave the United Kingdom for Hollywood in 1955.[9] When the base of Ealing studios was sold that year, Mackendrick was cut loose to pursue a career as a freelance director, something he was never prepared to do:
At Ealing ... I was tremendously spoiled with all the logistical and financial troubles lifted off my shoulders, even if I had to do the films they told me to do. The reason why I have discovered myself so much happier teaching is that when I arrived here after the collapse of the world I had known as Ealing, I found that in order to make movies in Hollywood, you have to be a great deal-maker ... I have no talent for that ... I realised I was in the wrong business and got out.[10]
The rest of his professional life was spent commuting between London and Los Angeles. His first film after his initial return to the United States wasSweet Smell of Success (1957), produced byHecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions (HHL). This was a critically successful film about a press agent (Tony Curtis) who is wrapped up in a powerful newspaper columnist's (Burt Lancaster) plot to end the relationship between his younger sister and a jazz musician. Mackendrick got along poorly with the producers of the film because they felt that he was too much of a perfectionist. In the same period, Mackendrick assisted Dutch film makerBert Haanstra with the production of the comedy film,Fanfare (1958).
After his disappointment with HHL, Mackendrick directed several television commercials in Europe forHorlicks.
He also made a handful of films throughout the Sixties includingSammy Going South (1963) for former Ealing producerMichael Balcon now withBryanston Pictures,A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), andDon't Make Waves (1967).Sammy Going South was entered into the3rd Moscow International Film Festival.[11]
AfterSweet Smell of Success, Mackendrick returned to England to make the second HHL film,The Devil's Disciple (1959), but he was fired a month into production owing to lingering tension from their first project together. Mackendrick was devastated.
Mackendrick was replaced onThe Guns of Navarone for allegedly being too much of a perfectionist for spending more time than planned on scouting Mediterranean locations and insisting on elements ofancient Greek literature in the screenplay.[12]
A project to filmIonesco'sRhinoceros, which would have starredTony Hancock andBarbara Windsor, fell through at the last minute.
For several years, Mackendrick was set to direct abiopic ofMary, Queen of Scots, starringMia Farrow andOliver Reed.Universal Pictures was set to finance and distribute, and filming was set to begin in the spring of 1969. However, one month before principal photography was scheduled to start, Universal cancelled the project. The studio later financed a version of the film released in 1971, directed byCharles Jarrott and starringGlenda Jackson.
Mackendrick was disillusioned by the experience and retired from directing shortly thereafter.[13] The script by Mackendrick andJay Presson Allen has been well-received and the subject of academic appraisal,[14] described as the director's "lost masterwork."[13] In 2018, the script was adapted into a radio drama by theBBC.[15]
In 1969 he returned to the United States after being appointed the founding Dean of the film school of theCalifornia Institute of the Arts (now the CalArts School of Film/Video), giving up the position in 1978 to become a professor at the school.[4]
Some of Mackendrick's most notable students includeDavid Kirkpatrick,Terence Davies,F. X. Feeney,James Mangold,Stephen Mills,Thom Mount,Sean Daniel,Bruce Berman,Gregory Orr,Douglas Rushkoff,Lee Sheldon andBob Rogers amongst others.[4]
A collection of Mackendrick's handouts and lectures at CalArts were collected and published in the bookOn Film-Making : An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, with a foreword byMartin Scorsese.[16][17]
Mackendrick suffered from severeemphysema for many years and as a result, was unable to go home to Europe during much of his time at the college. He stayed with the school until he died ofpneumonia in 1993, aged 81. His remains are buried atWestwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
Critical consensus of Mackendrick's body of work, both as a filmmaker and later as a teacher, has grown significantly over time.[18] In his obituary, criticAnthony Lane compared him positively to bothAlfred Hitchcock andFritz Lang.[16] Paul Cronin described him as "one of Britain’s greatest film directors.... and one of the finest instructors of narrative cinema who ever lived."[16]
Geoffrey O'Brien described Mackendrick as a "singularly elusive sort ofauteur,"[19] whose films' "controlled surfaces and exquisitely lucid storylines a potential for chaos and violence swirls almost palpably. His reasonable and civilized art is profoundly in tune with instinctive forces that can manifest themselves as ecstatic celebration but also as tribal warfare or relentless perseverance in a private mission."[19]
TheBritish Film Institute'sScreenonline profile of Mackendrick called him "a perfectionist in an industry devoted to profit.... But if the overall sense of Mackendrick's career is of great potential unfulfilled, his oeuvre, though small, is distinctive and always rewarding, the work of a visually acute filmmaker who thought in images and movement whilst always remaining in command of cinematic storytelling; a director whose films offer a complex and ambiguous mix of pessimism, callousness, mordant humour and startling empathy with the innocent and brutal world of the child."[20]
TheHarvard Film Archive wrote of Mackendrick during a 2009 retrospective, "The full appreciation of Mackendrick’s oeuvre as a whole—which only began in earnest during the 1970s—has accelerated since his death, a re-evaluation that has found his lesser-known and later films equally rewarding as his acknowledged masterpieces. This belated appreciation no doubt owes a debt to Mackendrick’s classicism, his dedication to well-crafted, character-driven narratives that avoid baroque visual excess in favor of a subtler authorial stamp, the complex emotional and intergenerational dynamics that unite Mackendrick's films, be they funny, disturbing, moving or a heady combination of all three."[18]
Mackendrick is the namesake of the Alexander Mackendrick Award for Best Director at the St. Andrews Film Festival.[21]
| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Notes | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1937 | Midnight Menace | No | Yes | [22] | |
| 1948 | Saraband for Dead Lovers | No | Yes | ||
| 1949 | Whisky Galore! | Yes | No | ||
| 1950 | Dance Hall | No | Yes | ||
| 1951 | The Man in the White Suit | Yes | Yes | ||
| 1952 | Mandy | Yes | Story | ||
| 1954 | The Maggie | Yes | No | ||
| 1955 | The Ladykillers | Yes | No | ||
| 1957 | Sweet Smell of Success | Yes | No | ||
| 1963 | Sammy Going South | Yes | No | ||
| 1965 | A High Wind in Jamaica | Yes | No | ||
| 1967 | Don't Make Waves | Yes | No | ||
| — | Mary, Queen of Scots | Yes | Yes | Unrealized |
Other credits
| Year | Title | Roles | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | The Blue Lamp | 2nd unit director andscript doctor | [22] |
| Institution | Year | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academy Award | 1953 | Best Screenplay | The Man in the White Suit | Nominated |
| Moscow International Film Festival | 1963 | Grand Prix | Sammy Going South | Nominated |
| Telluride Film Festival | 1986 | Silver Medallion | — | Won |
| Venice Film Festival | 1952 | Golden Lion | Mandy | Nominated |
| Special Jury Prize | Won |
