The multi-faceted career of Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993) has all too often been reduced to his great success as a master of postwar British comedy, such that even his most celebrated film, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), is seen as an aberration and credited more to Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehmann's acerbic screenplay than Mackendrick's astute direction. Born in Boston and raised in Glasgow, Mackendrick's life— split between two worlds—echoes the polar extremes of his films, which alternate between gentle comedy and subversive satire, sharp neorealism and irreverent fantasy.

After making propaganda films at the Ministry of Information during World War II, Mackendrick landed a job at Ealing Studios, a rising company to which the young director helped bring international renown for the house style of clever yet gently humane comedies. Mackendrick’s first two features, Whisky Galore! (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951), remain two of the best and most beloved examples of the Ealing comedy, clever and genteel on the surface while containing a satirical vision of hidebound British ways. Together the films introduce the dominant theme of Mackendrick’s work: the destructive yet essential anarchy of innocence, with its unerring ability to undermine authority. This theme reaches a high point in The Ladykillers (1955), Mackendrick's last Ealing film and the studio's darkest and most popular comedy.

After the success of The Ladykillers, Mackendrick was hired away from Ealing to direct what is still his best-known film, Sweet Smell of Success, a trenchant indictment of the insidious tabloid politics fortified by the 1950s media, and still all too strong today. Although Mackendrick’s career faltered without the supportive structure of the studio, he completed three more features, including his late masterpiece A High Wind in Jamaica (1965). The commercial failure of his last films left Mackendrick out of favor with both British and American film industries and happy to accept his 1969 appointment as dean of the film program at the newly-founded California Institute of the Arts (best known today as CalArts), where he remained an influential instructor and beloved administrator until the end of his life.

The full appreciation of Mackendrick’s oeuvre as a whole—which only began in earnest during the 1970s—has accelerated since his death, a re-evaluation that has found his lesser-known and later films equally rewarding as his acknowledged masterpieces. This belated appreciation no doubt owes a debt to Mackendrick’s classicism, his dedication to well-crafted, character-driven narratives that avoid baroque visual excess in favor of a subtler authorial stamp, the complex emotional and intergenerational dynamics that unite Mackendrick's films, be they funny, disturbing, moving or a heady combination of all three.