Whisky Galore!
Directed by Alexander Mackendrick
Running time: 1hr22 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
A scene from Whisky Galore!
72 years ago, Whisky Galore! was a summer smash of sorts, one of a sudden trio of clever, loose-limbed, grown-up entertainments, all from the same studio, that minted the “Ealing comedy” genre. It seems unimaginable now that it was released days before Kind Hearts and Coronets, and mere weeks after Passport to Pimlico, cheering up a British industry and public still in the doldrums of postwar austerity — even as it tartly satirised the miseries of wartime rationing, and played on Britain’s tendency toward social and geographical self-isolation. (In America, where a titular mention of alcohol was deemed taboo, it was not entirely inappropriately renamed Tight Little Island.)
But that was then and this is, er, now: under a glum pandemic hangover, Britain has cut ties from the rest of Europe, its population is largely grounded, and every day brings gloomier headlines about how the “pingdemic” is keeping our shop shelves stripped bare. In this climate, Alexander Mackendrick’s jaunty, eccentric farce — about a remote, ration-bound island community in the Outer Hebrides going collectively mad when a passing freighter runs aground with a windfall of whisky — seems less cute and fanciful than it might have done a few years ago, and one can’t help wondering if BBC programmers popped it on TV schedules last week entirely by accident.
Either way, it’s comfort viewing in multiple senses. As with the best Ealing comedies, the neat, pure pleasures of its construction — the balance of perceptive zing and outright, unashamed silliness in the writing, the cogs-clicking chemistry of its ensemble — are fully intact and not era-specific. But this is joyful, ticklish entertainment born of strained times, and fit for them, even decades later. Rewatching it, I wondered if it might even be suited to a smartly updated remake: it took me a good few minutes to recall that not only was a new, mediocre Whisky Galore! made only a few years ago, but I even reviewed the thing, only for it to sink from memory entirely. The original, meanwhile, is a sharp remnant of the past, against which the present keeps bouncing.
WHISKY GALORE! (1949) Written by Compton Mackenzie, Angus MacPhail | Shot by Gerald Gibbs | Edited by Joseph Sterling