The remote Scottish island that changed Hollywood forever: “We were flabbergasted”
How do you get from a remote Scottish island with barely over a thousand inhabitants to a multi-billion-dollar corporate empire and a laundry list of influential filmmakers who’ve made equally influential and transformative movies? As it turns out, all it takes is one man.
Not only that, but a directorial debutant, no less. In the summer of 1948, Alexander Mackendrick, his cast, and his crew pitched up on Barra, the second southernmost inhabited island in the Outer Hebrides, to shoot what would eventually become known as the beloved Ealing Studios comedy, Whisky Galore!
The whimsical caper, set in 1943, follows a group of locals on the fictional island of Todday, who’ve been running low on booze due to wartime rationing. In a stroke of good fortune, a shipwreck just off the coast happened to be carrying 50,000 crates of whisky, putting them in the crosshairs of the English.
Mackendrick, who went on to helm The Ladykillers, made an impact, with Whisky Galore! the first Ealing comedy to find box office success in America, opening the doors for the studio’s signature brand to find an increasingly large audience in the United States. However, it was only after his filmmaking career ended that his real legacy began.
Moving to America himself, he only directed one notable picture on the other side of the pond, but 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success overcame its initial commercial misery to become an influential slice of seminal film noir, especially adored by Martin Scorsese, being inducted into the National Film Registry in 1993 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Mackendrick wouldn’t step behind the camera again after 1967’s star-studded sex comedy Don’t Make Waves, but two years later, he was named the founding Dean of the California Institute of the Arts’ newly established film school, and in 1978, he resigned that title to become a professor. If the name of the university doesn’t ring a bell, it should.
Some of the notable alumni to have passed through its doors during his tenure numbers James Mangold, who said, “He modelled what it is to be a film director,” Tim Burton, Henry Selick, and the entire future Pixar brain trust, including John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton, and more, and it doesn’t take much to see how far Mackendrick’s reach has continued to extend.
“He came into our programme, and we had this idea that he’s looking down on us, the animators,” Bird told Vanity Fair. “But he brought in storyboards that he’d done in the 1940s, and we were flabbergasted because they were unbelievably well drawn. And so he had drawing cred with us right away. Which was silly, because he was a brilliant director, but we didn’t know it.”
Mangold has directed Cop Land, Walk the Line, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine trilogy, Bird took the reins on The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, while Pixar reinvented the industry through its groundbreaking computer animation, churning out classic after classic, before being subsumed by the monolithic Disney empire in a $7.4 billion deal.
You could make the argument that Mackendrick doesn’t have much to do with that, other than the fact that he was spoken of so highly by several alumni. And yet, what was the second book listed by long-time Pixar staffer Brian McDonald on the list of 22 books that the studio recommends every one of their interns read? On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, written by Alexander Mackendrick.
Andrew Stanton, another Pixar veteran who’s been involved with almost all of the studio’s greatest films, once opined that, “Alexander Mackendrick had a great quote, that ‘drama is anticipation, mingled with uncertainty,'” indicating that his teachings and influence continue to exert themselves on the animation powerhouse’s output.
None of that would have happened had Whisky Galore! not toppled the first domino that launched him to prominence within the industry, and as bizarre as it sounds, you can draw a straight line between the wee island of Barra and this summer’s mega-budget sequel Toy Story 5, and it runs directly from Mackendrick.
