Alexander MACKENDRICK

Among the talented team assembled at Ealing Studios by Michael Balcon two directors stand out for their individualism, Robert HAMER and Alexander Mackendrick. If Hamer's films are distinguished by their visual stylisation and melancholy tone, then it is Mackendrick who took the Ealing comedy style and pushed it into areas of satire and black humour which mark his films out from the more whimsical, optimistic approach usually favoured by Balcon.

Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 8 September 1912 of Scottish parents. With the death of his father in 1919, he returned to live in Glasgow with his grandfather. After studying at the Glasgow School of Art he went to work as an artist for the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson in London where he remained for the rest of the 1930s. In the late 1930s he scripted several cinema commercials and co-wrote his first feature film, Midnight Menace (1937). During the war he wrote a number of short propaganda films for the animators HALAS and BATCHELOR, directed some educational inserts for Pathé newsreels and co-directed two propaganda documentaries for the British Army in Italy following the fall of Rome. After the war he founded Merlin Productions which made documentaries for the Ministry of Information, but when it floundered in 1946 he went to work for Ealing.