Great Britain

I'm All Right, Jack used swingeing satire; The Man In The White Suit constructs a witty fable. In each case, the aim is the same; to illustrate the built-in inertia of 'both sides of industry' as the political phrase was in 1951, when Alexander Mackendrick made this movie. Industry may still suffer front inertia; but, alas, there are no films around today from British studios to chastise it so wittily, sharply and above all logically as this Ealing comedy. Alec Guinness embodies the threat to a complacent textile tycoon played by Cecil Parker. Guinness is one of his brilliant young researchers who invents, on the side, a miracle fibre that can be woven into material to produce everlasting garments. But one man's universal boon is another man's imminent redundancy. The boss is appalled when he gets to hear of it - a scene of marvellously constructed absurdist comedy as Parker on the phone orders the scientist to be sent over to him forthwith while simultaneously ordering his butler to send packing a caller who's come without an appointment. The caller, of course, is Guinness. Thus does management immobilize itself by its own self-protection. Ernest Thesiger, one of the great English actors of his day, incarnates the aggressive opposition, as a malevolent industrial 'Godfather', hitting out vainly at the obdurate Guinness when pleas, bribes and menaces fail to move him. Mackendrick's co-screenwriters John Dighton and Roger Macdougall took some stick themselves from the critics for an ending some found unnecessarily savage in the way it humiliated the already humble, as the 'little fellow' is unexpectedly left nearly naked to his enemies. But in our less sentimental age, Guinness's performance, and especially his affectionate scenes with Joan Greenwood as the boss's daughter, invest the film with sympathetic pathos; and coming immediately after The Lavender Hill Mob and less than a year after Kind Hearts And Coronets, it proved he could play 'straight' roles as brilliantly as, and maybe more touchingly than his genial grotesques. ALEXANDER WALKER