Mackendrick, Alexander

Mackendrick, Alexander (1912–1993), American-born Scottish feature-film director and teacher. Mackendrick was responsible for some of the finest films to come from the Ealing Studios in Britain, including Whisky Galore (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951). Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955), which proved to be Ealing's last major film, possesses a macabre eccentricity that makes it one of the top British comedies. Mackendrick went on to Hollywood to direct Sweet Smell of Success (1957), an acerbic portrayal of a powerful New York gossip columnist.

Although born in Boston, Massachusetts, Mackendrick grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. After art training, he gravitated to cinema as a result of wartime information work. He joined Ealing Studios and had several screenplay credits before directing his first feature, Whisky Galore, an iconoclastic tale set and largely filmed in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. Another satirical comedy, The Man in the White Suit, was followed by the drama Mandy (1952), which managed to avoid sentimentality in its treatment of the story of a deaf-mute child. After The Ladykillers, Mackendrick went to the United States to direct Sweet Smell of Success. Although critically acclaimed, the film was a box-office failure, and his problems with Burt Lancaster, the film's producer and star, undermined Mackendrick's subsequent career. He directed three more films, of which the most accomplished was A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), but all were troubled, and Mackendrick was happy to abandon active film-making for teaching film at the California Institute of Fine Arts.