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The comic canvas is adduced from Powell (I Know Where I'm Going!), craggy and overcast and richly filled by Alexander Mackendrick in his debut. "Few and simple pleasures" in the Scottish Hebrides, alcohol chief among them, "the Water of Life" that enlivens the weather-beaten community. It dries up and so does their spirit, wartime rationing is quite the dark cloud. The Home Guard captain (Basil Radford) is an English prig who sets up useless road blocks and frets about anarchy, the sergeant (Bruce Seton) is more interested in the local kitty (Joan Greenwood, provocatively fusing brogue and purr). The gloom dissipates when a vessel carrying thousands of crates of the precious liquid is wrecked offshore, though the raid has to wait until after the Sabbath. (Dressed in pious black, the villagers watch impatiently from the hills: "Aw hell, we better get to church.") The elixir dances in glasses to a Gaelic ditty, it puts hair on the chest of the eunuch (Gordon Jackson) and resuscitates the dying hermit (James Anderson), even the severe crone (Jean Cadell) joins the festivities once lubricated. "You can't have a wedding without a rèiteach, and you can't have the rèiteach without whisky." The comedy is tailor-made for Ealing gentleness, yet Mackendrick's already evident feeling for mordant human clashes spikes the studio's coziness—vistas and tight interiors have an unexpectedly baleful luster, and the final view of Radford's spoilsport, deflated and humiliated and cackled at, could be out of Sawdust and Tinsel. "And if that is not a moral story, what is?" Lear's estimable Cold Turkey scrapes off the tale's Britishness to reveal its acrid sardonicism. With Catherine Lacey, Wylie Watson, Gabrielle Blunt, James Robertson Justice, John Gregson, and Duncan Macrae. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |