“The terrible children”: Wind in the sails. Surfaces and depths, the lucid movies of Alexander MacKendrick

Wind in the sails (To high wind in Jamaica)

The director: Alexander MacKendrick

Year: 1965

Country: The big Brittany / United States

103 min.

It photographs: Douglas Slocombe

Music: Larry Adler

Script: Stanley Mann, Ronald Harwood, Denis Cannan according to the novel of Richard Hughes Huracan in Jamaica, 1929

I distribute: Anthony Quinn, James Coburn, Deborah Baxter, Elizabeth Dean, Nigel Davenport, Gert Fröbe, Lille Kedrova, Dennis Price

If it had to choose governing only one to which systematically him racanea the category of “outstanding figure“ would not doubt it, immediately it would place the ensign on Alexander MacKendrick. Genuine author of short and compact career that makes his disappointed and pessimistic trace, his cruel conception of the human being printed even in more seemingly kind comedies, a movies that is like the calmed water: you do not know his depth until you get inside. And if between his splendid movies it was forced to indicate only one like perfect compendium of all his universe, that one would have to be,

Alexander MacKendrick and Edward G. Robinson during Sammy's shooting, flight towards the South in 1963

obligatorily, Wind in the sails.

On MacKendrick I have already written here, let's say than in the second grade. Two critiques for the portal Cinearchivo the same way recorded here on a pair of his works for exactly legendary (and affectionate) producer Ealing: The man of the white suit and touching Mandy (outstanding movie not only for his exceptional quality and humanity, but for presenting the first incursion in the world of the infancy, contemplated always of a way that excludes completely the condescension and the blandenguería without it does not imply lacking in tenderness and if a deep comprehension). For the British house he filmed also his début, delightful Whisky Galore! (1949), a comedy full of picturesqueness and kindheartedness ambientada in an isle that in full 2ªGM remains without " supply “of the knowledge” while a cargo ship replete with the same one sinks opposite to his coasts and another two comedies more: also islander The Maggie (1954) and the famous one The quintet of the death (1955), a memorable movie in which there is already contemplated in all his splendor one of the favorite topics of the director: the destructive capacity of the innocence. Something that was already camouflaged in The man of the white suit and that here takes the calm appearance of an adorable viejecita that is decimating a band of criminals without finding out.

The pessimistic blackness and his negative vision of the man will enter the beast his first American movie under the auspices of always attentive and anxious Burt Lancaster who produces Blackmail to him from Broadway (1957), a devastating work, on script bottomless of Clifford Odets, of a bitterness and lucidity it brings over (or with the excuse) of X-raying the mean journalistic world and the outskirts of the show business. Tony Curtis takes charge of the repulsive co-protagonist who introduces the typology of the careerist without conscience, the egoist who tries to manipulate the environment in his favor. Although in fact what it does here is rather to define it to the perfection, because the personage of Alec Guinnes in (again) The man of the white suit already presents features similar but seen from an optics of humorous cartoon and poisonous satire in the fund but kindly in the surface. Something similar to what MacKendrick would realize in the tape that it was his farewell, unsuccessful and ununderstood in due time (and today yet dependent on review) do not do waves (1967), toned portrait of the American society of the victory, coherentemente ambientada in one perpetually sunny California of beautiful and rich to that a Tony Curtis wants to gain access all cynicism.

Between averages of these works they embed themselves (in addition to several works without crediting and any premature other) two movies of infantile adventures, Sammy, flight towards the south (1963), which I regret without having seen and which is provided with always big Edward G. Robinson and this key piece that is a Wind in the sails.

And this way we come to her, but her, before beginning to review a little, the strange indifference relation is obligatory to point out that MacKendrick, a man otherwise extremely modest that importance was always coming out if the same and to his work a little like Mario Bava, he was feeling with regard to this masterpiece. In a fantastic interview realized in 1988 by Antonio Castro in the magazine Directed for … (nicely provided by Christian Aguilera, to whom I am grateful for it immensely and who also can be read in Looks of Movies) the director makes clear, with extreme crudeness, his consideration of frustrated and even frustrating movie on having moved away from the project that it had originally in mind (and that it had for many years, since it tried during 15 to take to the movies the outstanding novel of Richard Hughes), in which the narrative center, the point of view that he was guiding to the spectator was exclusively that of the children, instead of moving towards the personage of Coburn who is who contemplates the facts "from the outside". This project, which according to its own words Zanuck, which was the principal producer, he had never allowed them to film, was even cut away in the assembly table there being extirpated a prologue that realized of the life of the children in the island (one of the best parts of the novel, certainly that the state proves to be his onlooker, between the civilization and the savagery and his relation with his slaves, his parents and especially the experience of the death, something that later pirate will repeat point for point in his odyssey). Certainly if the result is impressive as it stayed, it shakes to think in what could have been a movie to which a critic of time Magazine defined at the moment of his premiere like ”… of seeing Shirley Temple singing a happy song in a ship while it carves up to a pup”.

This phrase on innocent Shirley defines with punch line wittiness the sinister heart of a movie that plays the generic agility and the sweetened poison while the desmitificador exhibits atrozmente the twilight of a genre and of a time with the free aspect of a cruel fable (it is not free detail of the villains assaulting transvestites the ship in which the children travel). A story for adults rich in unhealthy details (the children playing with the head of the figure of the figure head while the pirates remain terrified, …) and strange relations that melt / confuse the love, the obsession and the mutual fascination, inside a complex conceptual and dramatic framework that turns environment to the exchange of rolls, to the power and especially to this destructive capacity of the innocence already recounted earlier. An overthrow that makes invalidated the capacity of reaction to the imminent catastrophe and that corporeiza in this occasion in this vision personalísima of the infantile universe that does not admit anything more that the truth and that is achieved (and here me "intertextualizo" to the same) with a simplicity that it mixes of observation and deep comprehension, of which one is born a capacity of psychological penetration and an amazing, propitious sensibility to recreate and to transmit an infantile mentality without committing adultery. With all his complex form, his absurd logic and his raw beauty. A victory at present alone comparable to the teaching of Hayao Miyazaki, especially in the exciting purity of this masterpiece that is My neighbor Totoro (1988). The author does not treat the children as adult, not how to idiots. It treats them as to children. His camera obeys the prescripts of John Ford; it is placed at a height of the look. It frames them from the same plane, both physical and moral / intellectual. This way the lines between the good and evil are extremely diffuse and the conscience, more in the middle of similar ambience of barbarism and adventure, it tends to disappear replaced with well different values, the same dichotomy being reproduced on the covering of the ship between savagery and civilization that they were experiencing in the island but with the difference of the absence of the counterweight parental. Of equal way the death will be a fundamental element of the trip, so much the real one (one of the brothers will die incidentally and the destination of the captores is sealed fatally) as symbolically.

But of course all this powerful load is supported like an enriching substratum and sibilinamente nabbed under his playful aspect, his clean and simple formal beauty, his vibrant direction, his magnificent sound-track and a few big interpretations of his sensational share-out, especially of an Anthony Quinn, infantile and defeated, and a turbadora Deborah Baxter of magnetic and worrying presence, simultaneously helpless and implacable. An exciting, sincere and penetrating movie that closes with one of the most brutal ends of the history of cinema, horrifying in his absence of piety.

Filed bajo:60's, Alexander Mackendrick, Adventures, British, Union of craftsmen, Politique give auteurs, Wind in the sails Tagged: Alexander Mackendrick, Anthony Quinn, author, Aventuras, ship, kindness, civilization, comedies, cruelty, story, Deborah Baxter, disappointment, desmitificador, destructive, domain, Ealing, falsity, High wind in Jamaica, infancy, innocence, James Coburn, nastiness, manipulation, sea, death, children, west, parents, perverse, pirates, power, Richard Hughes, rolls, savagery, sequestration, Wind in the sails