The Man in The White Suit Film Analysis Textual Analysis

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The Man in the White Suit:

Textual Analysis

Jim Leach suggests emphatically that “The Man in the White Suit exposes the real source of power when a crisis in the industry provokes a telephone call to Sir John Kierlaw, an asthmatic old man, who arrives from London like Dracula descending on his unsuspecting victims.  As his car speeds through the night, Mackendrick inserts a shot of a road sign that reads simply, “To the North.”[1]  Instantly the film is removed from the cosy backdrop of middle-England and the London suburbs.  The establishing shot evokes John Milton’s “dark satanic mills” and the gusto with which the north of England took to the industrial revolution as we see the mills overshadow the cramped terraces and inhabitants.  The voice over by Cecil Park as mill owner Alan Birnley introduces the story and the perspective from which the story is told.  The concord in which Birnley and Corland are seen to be working with in business, borrowing and lending is clear in the opening moments of the film.   The almost incestuous relationship of the upper class mill owners is revealed lucidly with the introduction of Daphne, as the archetypal Ealing woman, as she is to be married off to Corland.  Whilst Daphne is strong, intelligent and manipulative, it is her overt sexuality that Mackendrick uses to subvert the archetype, whilst “Guinness was a character actor whose ability to adapt to the style of the film and to blend with the other actors suited the Ealing emphasis on “team spirit.”  Joan Greenwood was a more unusual choice for Ealing, since her distinctive throaty voice combined suggestions of upper-class refinement with an unmistakable sexual suggestiveness.”[2]

So much is suggested in the opening of the film, from the deferential “sir” and revelation of hierarchical detachment from the research laboratory as Sidney Stratton bundles through and skirts the peripheries, Mackendrick employing the cunning directorial use of slapstick and comic timing as Stratton interrupts the flow research that until now has proved fortuitously fruitless for the heads of industry.  A stagnant research department more interested in the lunch and tea break tradition of the English hand loom weaver is more beneficial to the powers that be than the ground breaking discoveries and infrastructure shaking breakthroughs that Stratton could provide.

Philip Kemp notes that it is through “a lapse into move-comedy cliché”[3] with Stratton talking into a bathroom mirror that perhaps we see Mackendrick’s own point of view.  Is Stratton addressing Corland, or is Mackendrick addressing Ealing, Balcon or post-war conservative Britain when he expounds that “it’s small minds like yours that stand in the way of progress”?  It is intriguing however that isolated in the bathroom is where the lone voice of science and progress is comfortable expressing his views so marginalised.  As we see in the following scene in a labour exchange of the 1950s where by startling similarity to the Job Centre Plus environs of the modern day an uninformed assistant is left almost dumbfounded by Stratton’s background and motivations looking for work.

To cover all facets of British industrial society Stratton finds himself befriending trade unionist Bertha who fails to spot the socialist potential of the scientist’s work and invention.  Inverted snobbery soon becomes apparent as another factor in the perpetuation of the status quo, and a portion of society resigned to knowing their place.  “fluxom floating of the flood tide of profit, there’s capitalism for you.”  And when Bertha exclaims “tea break, we had to fight for it!” another sector wedged into English traditions and lowered expectations propagate by a class riddled society.  The evocation “old school ties” is also visually enhanced by a motif prominent throughout the film of doors and windows opening and closing, partitions and benches blocking and separating those caught within the hierarchical structure of society.  The working class characters of the film cannot understand the idea of working without monetary return and social stratification, however, the old lady and Bertha, to an extent, demonstrate and present the altruistic nature inherent amongst “common people”.  Bertha is at once generous, confused and charitable by a character looking beyond the wage infrastructure to a higher calling.

The consternation Stratton causes in the mill arouses fear amongst the ranks of all quarters.  Mackendrick avoids casting Guinness as the mad scientist by having his tubes and equipment, and scientific jargon, true to scientific principles, more evidence of Mackendrick siding with the non-conformist eccentric.  When Daphne bellows “you don’t know and you’re too pig-headed to find out” again it seems the address is broad and societal.  The comedy is drawn not from Stratton’s experiments or attitude, but from the sound of his equipment, his ineptitude in enjoying a celebratory cigar and the confounded nature of his colleagues exasperated by the growing mound of apparatus and explosions.

The inference of military aesthetics with army helmets and sandbags adorning the laboratory addresses an idea that has been prevalent for far too many years, through Marxism and beyond, that war is a necessary by product of progress, a similar theme is used when the aristocrat settles to work at a company called Missiles in I’m Alright Jack! (1959). However, there are few and far between films such as these that address industry and perhaps none address military industrialism in any more direct a manor.  Slight satirical inference would suffice for the 1950s; Mackendrick or any other wouldn’t care to be more radical.

The film continues through many vicissitudes and what Philip Kemp refers to as the “thrust towards change and the blocking of that thrust.”[4]  The arrival of Sir John Kierlaw instigates the latter.  The sinister malevolence brought by the presence of this character and his action move the film further from traditional cosy Ealing territory “characterised by its whimsical humour and nostalgic picture of an idealised, imaginary nation of stubborn eccentrics and harmless anarchists.”[5] Kierlaw is at once cold, calculated and insipid in his views on industry and industrial practice.  His persistence in preserving the old and traditional methods in this film is odious and completely contrasting the other comedies in which communities join together in preserving values of commonality.  Kierlaw embodies the pursuit of money and power, “contempt for others”, the capitalist system and the decaying traditions that people cling to.  He is experience incarnate and as monstrous as a villain should be considering all he represents, “the real source of power”[6].  As Philip Kemp indicates, the indoctrination of his values cause him to misread other’s motivations.[7]

The scenes with Kierlaw are the most revelatory and where “the satirical thrust is the sharpest,” “the cold blast of the old man’s realpolitik” whizzes in from the south in a black ghoulish shadow asserting that industry power lies in a centralised geographical area of privilege “the logic of [his] position developing with inexorable clarity” as “he resorts successively to bribery, violence, prostitution, and, if necessary, murder”[8] in order to command “control” of this development.  Kierlaw attests that seemingly archaic inventions, even for the time, such as the spinning jenny and the mechanical loom were disasters for those that didn’t control them highlighting the industrial relation to mechanisation, technology and scientific progress that has existed since the industrial revolution and still persists.  The technological developments outlined by the workers are still undeveloped and unresolved.  All sectors, however, bar Daphne and Sidney become complicit in the plot to suppress and cover-up of Sidney’s discovery.

Intellectual property, exploitation and the pitfalls of the economic free market that would “upset the delicate balance of trade” are evoked as question marks around Sidney’s discovery; the manufactured elements of bureaucracy that other Ealing comedies have rallied against.

Gender is the key component of the exchanges to follow: first between the mill owners and Daphne then Daphne’s seduction of Sidney, or what Philip Kemp refers to as “deficiency of passion masquerading as self-denial.”[9]  Daphne is used by Kierlaw and the mill owners to seduce Sidney unaware of Stratton’s resilience; or even obliviousness to temptation.  The pure narrow minded focus of the innocent scientist is obvious for all to see and the scene plays out as the most ambiguous of the entire film, each of the actors “giving out contrary signals.”[10]    Guinness plays Stratton’s straight faced bemusement opposite Greenwood’s complex emotional tapestry of sensuality, disappointment and satisfaction, a perverse contradiction yet their exchange and kiss encompasses a rich and complex jumble of sensations before the escape plan for Sidney is hatched.  Philip Kemp writes succinctly that “whether intended or not, the scene reinforces the film’s prevailing vision of communication blocked off, perceptions at cross-purposes.”[11] 

Dave Rolinson points out that the realisation at the close of the film is that “human relationships are determined by economic relationships,” the workers “want to be defined by the products they make” and how easily this can be subverted or counteracted with Sidney crashing into the “smooth camera work” Mackendrick uses to symbolise capitalism.[12]  And any emotional attachment along with technological progress is subverted and polluted.  Each facet of society has been alienated from one another to the extent that even this romantic exchange is fuelled by ambiguous sentiment.  Upon his escape Stratton even encounters petty bureaucracy and ‘jobsworth’ attitudes in pursuit of a shilling and a journey to Manchester, and then there’s the shocking realisation that Bertha and the workers wish to suppress his discovery too.  Rolinson points to Andre Gorz who writes that “The height of alienation is reached when it becomes impossible to conceive that an activity should have a goal rather than its wage.”[13] [14]

Continued is the ambiguous gender representation, an element of the inherent fear of the police as symbols of the establishment and a further evocation of the military aesthetic with Sidney appropriating the get up of a Roman gladiator.  The gender question is highlighted by Daphne’s manipulation of her father, “her tone of post coital languor … is toe-curlingly delicious”[15] and consecutive shots of male figures inability to open a closed door hints at the emasculation of the traditional male father figure, perhaps also the impotence of British male, won’t smash the glass of the door to escape from Bertha’s bathroom.

Stratton’s short interaction with a child shows intuitive innocence and playfulness of a child, this is touched upon twice in the convening chase sequence when the young girl helps Sidney escape from Bertha’s digs and pointing the mob in the wrong direction in their subsequent pursuit of the scientist.  This according to Charles Barr and Philip Kemp also prefigures Mandy Miller playing the role of the protagonist in Mackendrick’s next film Mandy as she is so refreshingly “direct and unselfconscious,” an innocent child becoming something of a theme in future Mackendrick movies.

As the workers and the bosses conspire together a further revelatory piece of dialogue is spoken by Charles Cullum as a company director, an obvious member of the upper hierarchy betrayed by his accent and manners: “Capital and labour are hand in hand in this, once again as so often in the past each needs the help of the other” he proclaims highlighting a past of capital and labour cohesion and a willingness to conspire in securing the future of free market industrialism.  Bertha, a fervent trade unionist even takes Sir John Kierlaw, who embodies all she despises, yet recognises and therefore does not seem to fear, by the hand and helps into a town car to pursue Stratton.  “OK duck, there’s room for one more inside” she gleefully chirps in acquiescence.

The powerful forces of advertising and marketing are also skilfully brought into the equation as in Cullum’s speech he reveals how no company would wish to market Stratton’s discover – as marketing and advertising companies require complicit cyclical consumption and, to a certain extent, planned obsolescence.  The advertising hoarding Sidney failingly attempts to hide in front of, only serving to illuminate, is for ‘The Frampton Overcoat’ which claims to “cover a multitude”, and in the case of any advertising and marketing the whole point is to cover up or iron out any creases in a products capability or durability, as Mackendrick would have been all too aware from his previous employment with J. Walter Thomson (a London advertising agency).  This segment leads nicely to one of the biggest laughs of the film when a baker is mistaken for Stratton and then ensues a short chase from the mob before he crumbles onto his doorstep where his wife, presuming his guilt in any given misdemeanour, shouts from an upstairs window; a further suggestion of the emasculated British male in postwar England.

“What about my bit of washing when there’s no washing to do?” is an often quoted line from the film as a suggestion that Sidney’s endeavours are ultimately inhumane as scientific progression causes consequences that are sometimes negative to the population and traditional employment.  The puzzlement pictured on Guinness’s face as his brain computes this statement is one of contemplation and confusion, an expression of bewilderment as to why even an old washerwoman wouldn’t embrace technological progress, an expression of bemusement as to why inventions and inventiveness freeing up time for other human endeavours besides chores and ‘work’ would be a bad thing.  This scene is perhaps the crux of the film in terms of how you might read the film’s overall message.  In the other Ealing comedies the audience would be expected to be on the side of the consensus and the community joining together, however, if you note Mackendrick as the outsider within Ealing Studios, the ultimate subversion surely would be to have the audience side with the lone ranger of science, or at least question where their allegiance truly lies and their motives for such a choice.

In a contemporary review from the BFI Monthly Film Bulletin it claims that “in the second half, attention is shifted from Stratton himself to the various machinations of capital and labour, which are also wittily described. The scene of Stratton’s final humiliation makes it clear that The Man in the White Suit is in fact a tragi-comedy, but that Alexander Mackendrick has not followed through all its implications”, a clear indication that the Ealing tradition of return to quiet and quaint equilibrium was the order of the day.  “The impact of the adventure on Stratton himself is never really clinched: he remains a distant, ambiguous figure, motivating events but never clearly reacting to them. This combined with the fact that the fabric turns out to be useless anyway, makes the film contract instead of expand in the final sequences.”[16]  However, by the end of the film clearly our hero has realised what he has done wrong, a way to keep his creation from being unstable, and is intent on getting back into a laboratory and do things right this time, proving that the motivation to create is stronger than the fear of the mob.  It is this distance and ambiguity that allows science to work and progress, but Stratton isn’t singularly portrayed as a cold feature of some dystopian future.  Charles Barr reads the ending as purely a comment upon Ealing Studios, as a “prophetic” take on the oncoming “stagnation” of the studios themselves, the disintegration of the suit representing as much.[17]

The film closes with Stratton strolling along Chaplin style towards the sunrise, a bright future Mackendrick must surely pine for, Kemp writing that it could suggest that “the disruptive spirit of change is irrepressible and must ultimately triumph over inertia and sterility.”  The narration returning for the final segments of dialogue, and the closing remarks of a character we now know to be an emasculated father figure and key tool in the perpetuation of the status quo mill owner Birnley suggests he’s pleased to see the back of Stratton as the crisis in industry is averted.  The very last remark of “at least, I hope that’s the last we’ve seen of him…” raises the question of the gaze and bias of the narrator, and the viewer’s level of trust that should be invested in him, a final question of authority from Mackendrick.

Philip Kemp writes “some critics have taken White Suit’s satirical stance as nothing more subtle than ‘a plague on both your houses … but Mackendrick, as might be expected is offering nothing so trite or blandly uncommitted.  His target is the system itself, class-ridden and self-perpetuating, which can ingest and remould in its own image any impulse towards change.”  In the final part of this essay I would like to discuss and expand on this reading of the film, and consider the possibility that when Kemp continues that “The Man in the White Suit depicts a Britain where a sterile conservatism has settled back down, like a layer of fluffy grey dust, over all the classes, where the nominally progresses forces of the Left reveal themselves, when it comes it, no less hostile to change than the moneyed interests of the Right” he could just as easily be describing events following the election(?) of the coalition government in Britain in 2010.  Also, I wish to discuss the film’s reception in 1951 and the response of more recent critics.

[1] Leach, Jim, British Film, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 148.

[2] Leach, Jim, British Film, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 148.

[3] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.53.

[4] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.50.

[5] Chapman, James, Past & Present: national identity and the British historical film, London, I.B. Tauris, 2005, p.146.

[6] Leach, Jim, British Film, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 148.

[7] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.57.

[8] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.58.

[9] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.61.

[10] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.61.

[11] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.61.

[12] Rolinson, Dave, “’If they want culture, they pay’: consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies” in Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (Eds.) British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration, Manchester University Press, 2003, p.92.

[13] Gorz, Andre, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-based Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992. 

[14] Rolinson, Dave, “’If they want culture, they pay’: consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies” in Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (Eds.) British cinema of the 1950s: a celebration, Manchester University Press, 2003, p.92.

[15] Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick, London, Methuen, 1991, p.61.

[16] “Man in the White Suit, The (1951)” in The Monthly Film Bulletin, Volume 18, No.212, September 1951, p. 326.

[17] Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios 2nd Edition, London, Studio Vista, 1993, p. 145.