Word: mackendrick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...screenplay, by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (who wrote the book), is for the most part brilliant, capturing the lingo perfectly: "What am I? a bowl of fruit? a tangerine that peels itself?" Or: "Starting today, you could play marbles with his eyeballs." And the pace of director Alexander Mackendrick keeps up with that of the music...
Director Alexander Mackendrick, who also had a hand in writing the script, is a master of nuances with the camera and in picking English types with an air of reality-harried bureaucrats, laboratory assistants who help themselves to a wee drop from a retort now and then, and other pungent touches. Particularly amusing is the chemical apparatus that serves as a running gag throughout the film. Also sprightly is Benjamin Frenkel's music...
Alexander Mackendrick's High and Dry is very possibly the funniest Baling comedy to date, a picture as salty and Scottish as a whelk in the Firth of Forth. A sort of sister picture to his Tight Little Island, this one might be called a tragedy of plumbing...
This spoof on a rather shabby world is stitched through with a wealth of humorous design by Authors Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Co-Author-Director Alexander (Tight Little Island) Mackendrick: the series of explosions as the oblivious chemist experiments with his weird test-tube apparatus; the harassed high financiers embroiled in low comedy; the inventor walking off, Chaplin-like, at the fadeout, presumably to continue his single-minded quest for the magic fabric...
They seem even more impressive as the work of a new director, Alexander Mackendrick, on his first feature assignment. Director Mackendrick has some expert allies: the players, besides Radford, include Wylie Watson, Gordon Jackson and a fetching blonde named Joan Greenwood. Best of all, he has an unerring screenplay, based on Compton Mackenzie's novel, Whisky Galore, and written by Mackenzie and Angus Macphail. The script savors the cream of the jest, wastes not a drop and ends gracefully with a wry concession to the moral superiority of teetotalers...