Whisky Galore! & The Maggie: Two Films by Alexander Mackendrick

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Product Description ------------------- Whiskey Galore!It is 1943 and the tiny remote Hebridean island of Todday is plunged into the depths of despair. Everyone is affected. Spirits are at zero - for Todday is without whisky. Then a ship founders on the rocks, and the islanders guide the crew to safety. The ship's captain and mate reveal that they had on board a cargo of 50,000 cases of whisky bound for America. Held up for a day because it is the Sabbath, the islanders eventually succeed in removing a considerable a of the cargo and the dawn breaks with a rosy glow on a brighter, happier island. But the whisky does not last forever... Inspired by a true story. The Maggie"Maggie" is one of the fifty-odd puffer boats which chug among the Western Isles of Scotland. Squat, unprepossessing, and badly in need of paint, she is destined for the scrap yard unless her skipper can get her repaired. This seems a forlorn hope - until Mr. Pusey makes his mistake. Mr. Pusey works for the high-pressure American businessman, Calvin B. Marshall, who has a valuable cargo to be shipped to one of the isles. And Mr. Pusey's disastrous error is in allowing, through a misunderstanding, the cargo to be entrusted to the humble 'Maggie' with her crew of four. Originally released in the US as High and Dry. Review ------ As usual for Ealing, the picture is brimming with delightful character portraits, from a dying man's (James Anderson) resurrection with the arrival of the stolen liquor, to mama's boy George's (Gordon Jackson) hilarious defiance of his stern, religious mother (Jean Cadell) after finding courage in several glasses of the newly-opened whiskey. Though a comedy, the film has exceptionally dramatic monochrome photography by Gerald Gibbs, images so good as to evoke memories of another classic of British cinema, Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (1937). The mostly Scottish cast includes perennial favorites like James Robertson Justice, Gordon Jackson, and Duncan Macrae (Finlay Currie narrates), but also eccentrically sexy Joan Greenwood. - Stuart Galbraith IV, DVD Talk Together with Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets and Henry Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore! established the Ealing Studios' reputation for producing high quality British comedies. - Svet Atanasov, Blu-ray.com [A] convivial little classic. --Pauline Kael, The New Yorker The result is the sweetest, smartest and most joyous of all the Ealing comedies. - Tom Huddleston, Time Out Another happy demonstration of that peculiar knack British movie makers have for striking a rich and universally appealing comic vein in the most unexpected and seemingly insular situations. - Thomas Pryor, The New York Times Out of this excellent idea, which less skilled hands might have reduced to farce, the British moviemakers have spun a tight little comedy of pure gold. --Time Magazine One of three Ealing comedies released in 1949 (the others were Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets), and remains by far the sharpest, freshest and most resonant. - Marc Lee, The Daily Telegraph Blessed be Mr. Mackendrick and the canniness of the Scots. Blessed be Michael Balcon and his Ealing Studios. For the smooth combination of all these factors that is represented in this film has resulted in a jolly entertainment that is as bracing as the Hebridean air. Mr. Mackendrick has stuck to the real outdoors for the better part of his picture, and you can feel it, all the way through. It is downright intoxicating. And High and Dry is a hearty, wholesome film. - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times Alexander Mackendrick always managed to bring an undertone of social reality to the comic fantasies he directed for Britain's Ealing Studios, and for that reason they remain in the mind much longer than those of his colleagues. This 1954 effort stars the Hollywood actor Paul Douglas as an American millionaire who has hired an ancient cargo boat to haul a ain of expensive furniture to his new vacation home on a Scottish island; Mackendrick satirizes the American's bluster and the willful inefficiency of the cranky Scottish crew without compromising the warmth of the utopian dream the quest for a safe harbor from the franticness of modern life that motivates the action. --Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader