"The longest unsponsored advertisement ever to reach cinema screens", reckoned producer Monja Danischewski. Maybe so, but Alexander Mackendrick's debut feature is much more than that. This comic account of a real-life event pitches a priggish English army captain against the remorseless guile of an islandful of thirsty Scots defending a cache of shipwrecked whisky, and helped make ‘Ealing Comedy’ one of British cinema’s most enduring brands. It's a film of boundless mischief, and it marked Mackendrick from the start as the most complex and subtle of Ealing's directors.
Up Next in Comedy
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Carry On Nurse
With a colonel constantly causing annoyance, a bumbling nurse, a budding romance between a patient and nurse, and a man obsessed with having his bunion removed, Haven Hospital's new Matron (Hattie Jacques) has a lot of hard work ahead. As she goes on ruling with an iron fist, Oliver Reckitt (Kenn...
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Two Way Stretch
In Huntleigh prison, a group of cellmates (Peter Sellers, Bernard Cribbins and David Lodge) plan the perfect burglary. By escaping the day before their release, then breaking back in again, they will have the perfect alibi when they rob a maharajah's palace of its diamonds - they will seemingly n...
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The Belles of St. Trinian's
When it is announced that term is about to begin at St. Trinian's, townspeople board up their shops, and policemen panic, for St. Trinian's is a school like no other. Presided over by headmistress Miss Fritton, the unorthodox free expression she preaches leads to her students being uninhibited. W...
