There Are No Rules': The Film Teaching of Alexander Mackendrick

In 1969, Alexander Mackendrick, still at the height of his powers as a film director, quit the industry and, at age fifty-seven, embarked on a new career. For the remaining twenty-four years of his life, he taught filmmaking at the newly founded California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) – for ten years as the first Dean of the Film School, and subsequently as a Fellow of the Institute.

Anyone who admires Mackendrick's work must feel a pang of regret for all the films that the director of Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Ladykillers (1955) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) might have given us, had he stayed in the industry. Most tantalising of all, perhaps, is his great unrealised project: Mary Queen of Scots. A few of Mackendrick's vivid production sketches survive, along with an outline of his iconoclastic, fiercely anti-romantic approach with which he planned to 'cut the lace off the dialogue' and treat his material as 'a gangster story which smells of cow dung'. It was partly the collapse of this long-nurtured project, only weeks before production was due to start, that impelled him to quit filmmaking.