A subversive parody of the rousing war film, Mackendrick's beloved comedy is set on a Scottish island in the depths of wartime deprivation, its inhabitants cheered by the wrecking of a whiskey-laden boat off its rocky shore. An unexpected international success that helped put Ealing Studios on the map, Whisky Galore! follows the foiling of all plans to retrieve the ship’s spoils by Captain Paul Waggett, the island’s resident Englishman and commander of its Home Guard. The battle between the insistent islanders and the uptight Englishman transforms the film into a ribald comedy of manners and allows Mackendrick to fashion a tale of unsophisticated innocence rebelling against modern bureaucratic authority. 

The least-seen of Mackendrick’s Ealing pictures, The Maggie tells an unusual story of a culture clash between the Old and New Worlds. Its title is the name of a decrepit Scottish vessel whose wily captain blackmails an American tycoon into using his ramshackle boat to move valuable furniture to an island mansion. Mackendrick's precursor to Local Hero applies an almost anthropological interest in the vestiges of village culture in the postwar world to establish an irresolvable dichotomy between Yankee pragmatism and materialism and the penurious charm and superstitions of the islanders.