The Man In The White Suit has all the ingredients of the truly great Ealing comedies. The most vital of those ingredients being its director and star. Alexander Mackendrick’s previous film for Ealing was the magnificent Whisky Galore, and he would go on to make the peerless The Ladykillers. Then, of course, there’s Alec Guinness. The actor’s presence in an Ealing comedy is a mark of quality, as he starred in the studios’ finest comedy output The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts And Coronets. While The Man In The White suit isn’t such an incontestable classic as those films, it’s still a characteristically sly and satirical film and a solid entry in the Ealing canon.
Guinness brings to life another in his long line of complex comedy creations in Sidney Stratton, an scientist working in a textile mill whose latest invention, a fabric that never gets dirty or worn out, creates chaos in the British textile industry. The clumsily mild-mannered Stratton assumes his creation will revolutionise the industry, so he’s shocked when both the corporate bigwigs and the workers’ unions try to suppress it as they fear that is a material that lasts forever is marketed, the mills will go out of business and the workers will be on the streets.
Stratton takes it upon himself to reveal his creation to the world and has a luminous suit tailored for himself, forcing the awkward alliance between management and labour to resort to desperate measures to stop him. These measures include sending factory owner Alan Birnley’s (Cecil Parker) sexy daughter Daphne (Joan Greenwood) to seduce him. Daphne, however, starts to see the gawky scientist as a romantic revolutionary figure and her sympathies soon turn towards his altruistic cause rather than her greedy father’s.
Typically for an Ealing film and especially Mackendrick’s output it’s a fiercely satirical and quite dark story that’s told in a delightfully warm and cosy way. Here the evils and pitfalls of capitalism are being explored and although the humour sometimes verges on the cartoony (for example the way a chemical explosion does nothing more to its victims than tear their clothes and blacken their faces), it still has characters that, even though they’re broadly drawn, are completely believable and sympathetic. Guinness’s performance is, as it always was, spectacularly good, and he has the audience on his side right from the beginning with his masterful balance of humour and pathos. Indeed, in anyone else’s hands Stratton could have been a deeply unsympathetic character. And in the film’s climax, which sees him pursued by an angry mob like the villagers in Frankenstein, he proves once again that as a physical comedian he was more than a match for Chaplin or Keaton.
This is a pristine new restoration that has cleared up all the distracting blemishes that appeared on the previous DVD release and allows you to fully appreciate Douglas Slocombe’s gorgeously foggy cinematography. There’s also a great retrospective documentary with various filmmakers and historians discussing the film and Guinness’s genius.
Overall Verdict: A typically wonderful bit of satire from Ealing featuring another example of why Alec Guinness is one the greatest British actors of all time.
Special Features:
Brand new featurettes – Revisiting The Man In The White Suit
Behind the scenes stills gallery
Restoration comparison
Trailer
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon