Background
Alexander Mackendrick was born on 8 September 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Alexander Mackendrick was born on 8 September 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
He was educated at Hillhead High School from 1919 to 1926 and then went on to spend three years at the Glasgow School of Art.
Mackendrick was brought up in Scotland, and after a period in advertising he entered the British industry and worked in documentary.
During the war, he was in Rome in charge of the film unit of the Psychological Warfare Branch. In peacetime he returned to the industry as a scriptwriter: Saraband for Dead Lovers (48, Basil Dearden and Michael Relph); The Blue Lamp (49, Dearden); and Dance Hall (50, Charles Crichton). As a director, Mackendrick’s work flattered to deceive. After showing a sense of mordant fantasy quite beyond his beginnings in Ealing comedy, his work became more conventional and impersonal. After 1967, it stopped altogether.
There are recurring themes in his films: his interest in child psychology (Mandy, Sammy, and Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica); the unconscious betrayals of life; plus an instinct for the straight-faced account of pain and cruelty. But his major characteristic is unexpectedness. His comedies are funny, but The Man in the White Suit is touched by Kafka and The Ladykillers is rooted in George Orwell’s “English murder" and the Chamber of Horrors. Even The Maggie—a crucial film for an American Scot—has a sense of frustration that is genuinely tortured. The way in which native fevness conspires to sap the blustering Paul Douglas amounts to more than comedy. The ordeal is piled on until pain itself is dominant.
In other words, the creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment of Sweet Smell of Success have more background in his British films than seemed the case at the time. No other American director has come as close to the scathing clarity of Nathanael West or, at that time, had looked so straight at corruption. The accurate observer in Mackendrick was evident in the way both Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis were admitted to previously locked parts of themselves.
Of his three last films only High Wind in Iamaica seemed to belong to him and that was somehow choked off, as if Mackendrick could no longer face its meaning. He is a great loss, but he set up and directed an exceptional film program at the California Institute of the Arts from 1969 to 1978.