Sandy Mackendrick is best known for ‘Whisky Galore!’ but the Scottish film director’s true cinematic worth is about to be revealed

‘The films we made then, at Ealing or wherever, weren’t expected to last. The idea that they might still be seen 20 or 30 years later was never considered’ he says.

More than 40 years after it flopped at the box office, a short black-and-white film by a Scottish director is being re-released to unanimous acclaim.

If he is known to today’s audiences at all, Sandy Mackendrick is known for Whisky Galore! and other Ealing comedies. But the former Glasgow Art School student’s other work is now being rediscovered by audiences raised on Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

"We’re talking cast-iron classic," says Empire magazine’s five-star review of Sweet Smell of Success, Mackendrick’s dark portrait of New York showbiz columnist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and his relationship with press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis).

Curtis eschewed the pretty-boy and historical roles to play against type as the slimy agent who will do anything to get his clients mentioned by Hunsecker. Behind heavy spectacles, Lancaster is a model of quiet tyranny, using Falco to break up the relationship between his sister and her jazz musician boyfriend.

The Hunsecker siblings seem unnaturally close, but the relationship between the two men is even more unnerving - the criminal mastermind and his henchman; Frankenstein and Igor, dressed in suits and relocated to New York.

"Perhaps the most blisteringly cynical account of human ambition, greed and corruption ever made by the Hollywood studios," says critic Geoff Andrew in the National Film Theatre programme.

So how did Mackendrick go from making comedies in the Hebrides to an exploration of the corruption at the heart of the American dream, reaping praise from many of the world’s leading film-makers and critics?

Alexander Mackendrick was born in 1912 in Boston - although supposedly conceived in Hollywood by parents who had eloped from Scotland. His father died when he was six, and he grew up in Glasgow, attending Hillhead High and Glasgow Art School before taking a job in advertising and making propaganda films during the Second World War in England and Italy.

He joined Ealing Studios as a writer, but got his chance to direct when Ealing stepped up production to counter a dearth of Hollywood product. The studios were full, so Mackendrick and producer Monja Danischewsky (really Ealing’s publicity director) famously went to Barra and shot on location.

The story of islanders salvaging whisky from a grounded ship was long bracketed with other cosy Ealing comedies celebrating the eccentricity of the British people. But it is a much harder-edged film, and the islanders’ treatment of the English Home Guard captain seems just one step removed from Edward Woodward’s treatment in The Wicker Man. Already a dark sense of humour is apparent, even if the source is unclear.

The original novel by Compton Mackenzie was based on a genuine incident. The script was a collective effort, and it was Danischewsky, a Russian Jew, who developed the idea of a community fighting foreign interference - against the objections of Mackendrick, a Presbyterian with a strong work ethic.

What’s In A Name?

By all accounts the film was a mess, and another Ealing director, Charles Crichton, was brought in at the editing stage. It did only moderate business in Britain, but was a hit in the United States under the title Tight Little Island, and in France as Whisky a Go-Go.

Mackendrick always argued that films were collective efforts, although he admitted his work was infused by his "perverted and malicious sense of humour". He made four more films at Ealing: The Man in the White Suit, in which Alec Guinness faces the combined opposition of workers and bosses when he develops an indestructible fabric; Mandy, the only non-comedy, about a deaf child; The Maggie, whose clash of values between an American businessman and a Scots puffer crew prefigured Local Hero; and The Ladykillers, in which Alec Guinness’s gang proves no match for an innocent old lady.

Mackendrick struggled after the commercial failure of Sweet Smell of Success. He was sacked from The Guns of Navarone, his adaptation of Richard Hughes’s pirate novel A High Wind in Jamaica was butchered by the studio, and he never realised his dream to make a film about Mary Queen of Scots.

In 1969 he was appointed dean of the film school at the new California Institute of the Arts and made no more films between then and his death in 1993. By then, the critical reassessment of his work was under way, much to his bemusement. "The films we made then, at Ealing or wherever, weren’t expected to last," he told an interviewer in 1990 at the Quimper film festival, in France. "The life of a film was about 18 months, and the idea that it might still be seen 20 or 30 years later was never even considered."

In 1999, in a poll to determine Britain’s greatest films, The Ladykillers was No 13. The French director Bertrand Tavernier has described A High Wind in Jamaica as a masterpiece, and Mandy too has undergone considerable critical re-evaluation, though both titles remain unfamiliar to many. Mackendrick was wrong when he thought his films would last only 18 months, or even 30 years. Only now is their true value being fully acknowledged.

Sweet Smell of Success opens at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, on 5 October, with other Scottish dates to follow.