Alexander Mackendrick

(1912-1993)

Alexander Mackendrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA on September 8 1912, the only child of shipbuilding civil engineer Francis Mackendrick and his wife Martha. They had eloped to the United States from Glasgow in 1911, but when Francis died from influenza during the 1918 pandemic Martha was unable to support her son and he was raised back in Scotland by his grandfather.

He attended Hillhead High School in Glasgow, and felt that being an American made him an outsider, a sense of alienation he was able to share with a fellow pupil, Peter Proud, who was English. Finishing school in 1926, Mackendrick enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art. He left without gaining a diploma and moved to London with his cousin Roger MacDougall in the hope of working in pictures. Roger was a writer, and had already successfully sold a story idea to a film company. Between them they worked on a scenario for a thriller which they hawked around the studios with no success. To earn money Roger took to writing popular songs, while Sandy went to work for the advertising agency J W Thompson as a layout artist, and was soon promoted to art director.

On 24 March 1934 he married journalist Eileen Mary Ascroft. Both families disapproved, on the grounds that they were too young and too poor – Sandy was 21 and Eileen was 18. Their son Kerry was born the following year. Both later acknowledged their immaturity, and in her column for the Daily Mirror Eileen described how she felt trapped. They argued constantly and eventually Eileen took Kerry and ran back to her mother, certain that the marriage was over. Although they reconciled and the marriage continued through the end of the 1930s, it ended in divorce in 1943.

Sandy was doing well at JWT. His proficiency at laying out picture strip 'story' advertisements, a format much favoured by the agency, led to his storyboarding the Horlicks films made in the Netherlands by model-animator George Pal, the soundtracks for which were recorded in JWT's own recording studio. (I use the term 'storyboard' loosely here – my understanding is that Mackendrick drew up a rough 'comic strip' story sequence which Pal subsequently refined for the final films.) Pal also provided some cel animation work for JWT – three advertising films for Rinso, which Mackendrick may also have storyboarded.

JWT subsequently acquired their own rostrum camera which was used by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, who were providing JWT with illustrations, to make animated advertising films, again storyboarded by Mackendrick. Another art director at JWT, Bill Larkins, also used Halas and Batchelor to animate for him.

When Britain declared War in 1939 The Ministry of Information comissioned JWT to make films to present government directives to the public, knowing that the agency knew how to put over a message in a succinct and entertaining way. Both the agency and the Ministry understood that animation was a good medium for cinema advertising, and both Mackendrick and Larkins used Halas and Batchelor to make public information films. But the MoI felt the agency demanded too much autonomy, and decided to deal directly with the film makers. So in 1941 John Halas and Joy Batchelor, who had been bombed out of their London flat, set up their own studio in Bushey, and Bill Larkins set up Analysis Films with Anson Dyer, and later his own studio. Mackendrick turned to his cousin and they formed MacDougall and Mackendrick.

It was Disney Studio practice to screen the storyboard images for a cartoon in sync with the soundtrack in order to make any improvements before proceeding to the animation stage, and in the 1941 feature The Reluctant Dragon, which includes cartoon sequences in a live-action tour of the newly-completed Disney studio in Burbank, the Baby Weems short is presented in this manner. Robert Benchley, wandering into the Story Department, is shown the storyboard for a new cartoon, and as he looks at the panels, they become the storyboard film, albeit with slightly more finished sketches, and the additional touch of animated effects. Mackendrick took his cue from the success of this technique to utilise it for the information films made by MacDougall and Mackendrick. His lively and expressive sketches carry the stories of the MoI films and Contraries and the JWT advertisement I Like Lobsters, all accompanied by songs by Roger MacDougall.

In 1943 Mackendrick, an American citizen, was assigned to the Film Division of the Army Psychological Warfare Branch, a joint military-civilian Anglo-American psychological warfare unit under the order of then General Dwight D. Eisenhower in French North Africa, to draw cartoons for propaganda leaflets. He storyboarded a series of 4 propaganda cartoon films (animated back in England by Halas and Batchelor) for showing in the Middle East, featuring a boy called Abu and depicting the Axis as an evil Hitler Snake and Mussolini Toad, with the British forces personified as a friendly Tommy Tank.

In Italy he was reunited with Peter Proud, who had worked as an art director on feature films before the war, and after joining the army had been second-in command of camouflage in the Middle East, and after the fall of Rome they made two propaganda documentaries to be shown in Italian cinemas, I granai del popolo (to encourage Italian farmers to make surplus grain available for general distribution) and Le fosse Ardeatine (about the Nazis' massacre of civilian prisoners in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in response to a bomb attack by partisans on an SS Police Regiment).

His US draft card, filled by typewriter for registration on July 25 1945, but unsigned, describes him as height: 6ft.1in; weight: 165; eyes: brown; hair: brown; complexion: medium.

After the war Mackendrick joined MacDougall at Michael Hankinson's company Merlin Films, making films for the Central Office of Information. When Michael Balcon, producer at Ealing Studios, bought the rights to film Helen Simpson's novel Saraband for Dead Lovers in 1946, to be directed by Basil Dearden, he called on his favourite scriptwriting team, John Dighton and Roger MacDougall, to prepare the screenplay. It appears that MacDougall was concentrating on his stage plays and recommended Mackendrick to take his place. According to the BFI he also contributed to the production design. The film, Ealing's first Technicolor production, was released in 1948, by which time he had also provided storyboards for sequences in Ealing's tragicomedy Another Shore (1948) and written additional dialogue for The Blue Lamp (1948), all of which won him the job of director on Whisky Galore! (1949). He next directed The Man in the White Suit, the script for which he co-wrote with MacDougall and Dighton, which confirmed him as one of Ealing Studios's mainstay directors.

He is credited by the BFI with being a "consultant" on the films in Halas and Batchelor's Charley series of cartoons for the Central Office of Information (1948-9). I imagine that he helped out in the early scripting/storyboarding stages.

On 24 December 1948 he married Hilary Frances Thewell Lloyd. They had two sons,Matthew, born in New York in 1961, and Andrew, born in London in 1965.

When Balcon sold the Ealing studio to the BBC, in 1955, Mackendrick made the move to Hollywood, where he directed The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). He subsequently alternated between London and Hollywood, but he found being a free-lance director was not to his liking. In 1969 he was offered the Deanship of the newly-formed CalArts Institute, which he accepted and never looked back, continuing to teach until his death, of pneumonia, on 23 December 1993.

Filmography (Animation Only)

Links to Other Sites

BFI Screen-online Mackendrick, Alexander (1912-1993) Biography.

Wickipedia Alexander Mackendrick Biography.

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