WHISKY GALORE (1949)

Most studios would be happy to produce one good comedy a year; especially one that defined its era and provoked honest laughs over decades.  Yet, in 1949, little Ealing Studios had three.*  One of them was this debut pic for the criminally underutilized American-born/Scottish-reared director Alexander Mackendrick which happily riffs off a camera-ready true story already developed in Compton MacKenzie's novel about locals during WWII in a whisky starved island near the Scottish Hebrides who illegally salvage a shipwreck loaded with crates of high quality booze in a race against British authorities.   It's Dunkirk for spirits!  Easy to imagine a coarsened Hollywood version of this.  Instead, it has the feel of something real rather than being forced into prefab formulas.  Human nature over cheap laughs & drunkenness.  With a plus-perfect cast and dazzling on-location cinematography from Gerald Gibbs, Mackendrick, only recently out of advertisement shorts & documentaries, makes the sort of Ealing comedy John Grierson, Scottish ‘father’ of U.K.'s documentary movement, might have made.  Right down to the political gloss that shimmered over nearly all the films Mackendrick made before a couple of Hollywood misses sent him off to academia.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Complete the trio of classic 1949 Ealing comedy with PASSPORT TO PIMLICO  and KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/passport-to-pimlico-1949.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/kind-hearts-and-coronets-1949.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Some gags, especially the purely visual ones, so sly they only kick in late.  Look for one in the intro on how little entertainment is available on the island.  (It flew completely over the heads of American censors.)