Tuesday, 27 October 2015

The Man in the White Suit (1951 Alexander Mackendrick & co-scr)

Written with John Dighton and Roger Macdougall, from his play.

Guinness is terrific, displaying a weird mix of diffidence and confidence; Joan Greenwood is also wonderful.

Perry's unenlightening 'Forever Ealing' skips through it in a couple of paragraphs and doesn't even mention two of the most distinctive things about it - and of any British film come to that - the luminous suit and the extraordinary soundtrack to Guinness's chemical experiments. The latter was apparently created by sound editor Mary Habberfield using a tuba and a bassoon (unsubstantiated), mixed with bubbles. It was turned into 'White Suit Samba' performed by Jack Parnell and His Rhythm (and Mary's "Gurgle Glub Gurgle" is credited on the record).

But how Douglas Slocombe achieved that luminosity in night scenes without lighting everything else around him I've no idea. He's 102!

With Cecil Parker, Michael Gough, Ernest Thesiger, Howard Marion-Crawford (rather good as one of the industrialists), Vida Hope, Olaf Olsen, Judith Furse (nurse), Miles Malleson (tailor) and little Mandy Miller as a useful decoy.

It's not one of the Auric Ealings, but the score by Benjamin Frankel is good enough.

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