![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn managing to watch another one of the movies on Kanopy I noticed quite some time ago, I got around to a film I’d known about for rather longer than that. The library in my home town had a book about “twenty all-time great science fiction films,” from Things to Come to A Clockwork Orange (although it had been written a decade after the latest movie it covered), and one of its choices was The Man in the White Suit. That movie could have seemed interesting just because it was described as taking place on a modest scale at the time it was made (early-1950s England), but I suppose it starring Alec Guinness would have got my attention too.
Guinness plays a youthful scientist who, even in bouncing from textile company to company, manages to use a glassware contraption that makes pleasant and curious burbling sounds to create a synthetic fibre promised to repel all dirt and never wear out. Although the cloth woven from this fibre has to be cut with a blowtorch, it does make the white suit of the title. I remembered reading about some simple special effects establishing the fabric’s invulnerability, although some lighting tricks I hadn’t anticipated suggests it just about glows in the dark. Just as all of this is to be made public, though, both the textile magnates and the labour union start to sort out what it might mean to make fabric that doesn’t have to be replaced...
This is the sort of subtler science fiction that might seem more associated with written works than movies of the time. A scientific advisor in the credits got my attention; the technobabble that explains the synthetic fibre sounds a bit more credible than some that might be imagined. There’s also a lot of comedy in the film.
One worker, on hearing about the fabric for the first time, brings up “razor blades that never go dull” and “cars that run on water” as other inventions the controllers of society suppress. I suppose I’ve wondered in other contexts about the ease of invention in science fiction somehow feeding suspicions like that. Having labour turn hostile too at least makes things feel a bit less well-worn (although if they’d been the only antagonists that would have been well-worn as well).
As for the potential distraction of Alec Guinness being the star, I was struck by his youthfulness here. I’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, made only six years after this movie; in that later film he was easier to connect to his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. I’ll also admit to recalling old rumours anticipating “synthetic actors” that would have somehow had a young Guinness play a young Kenobi; these days, of course, in becoming a bit more plausible it’s another lightning rod and I made efforts to keep my thoughts amused. I have reminded myself this wasn’t just the sort of movie that could be called science fiction but one by the British studio Ealing Studios, another thing I’m less acquainted with in general.
Guinness plays a youthful scientist who, even in bouncing from textile company to company, manages to use a glassware contraption that makes pleasant and curious burbling sounds to create a synthetic fibre promised to repel all dirt and never wear out. Although the cloth woven from this fibre has to be cut with a blowtorch, it does make the white suit of the title. I remembered reading about some simple special effects establishing the fabric’s invulnerability, although some lighting tricks I hadn’t anticipated suggests it just about glows in the dark. Just as all of this is to be made public, though, both the textile magnates and the labour union start to sort out what it might mean to make fabric that doesn’t have to be replaced...
This is the sort of subtler science fiction that might seem more associated with written works than movies of the time. A scientific advisor in the credits got my attention; the technobabble that explains the synthetic fibre sounds a bit more credible than some that might be imagined. There’s also a lot of comedy in the film.
One worker, on hearing about the fabric for the first time, brings up “razor blades that never go dull” and “cars that run on water” as other inventions the controllers of society suppress. I suppose I’ve wondered in other contexts about the ease of invention in science fiction somehow feeding suspicions like that. Having labour turn hostile too at least makes things feel a bit less well-worn (although if they’d been the only antagonists that would have been well-worn as well).
As for the potential distraction of Alec Guinness being the star, I was struck by his youthfulness here. I’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, made only six years after this movie; in that later film he was easier to connect to his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. I’ll also admit to recalling old rumours anticipating “synthetic actors” that would have somehow had a young Guinness play a young Kenobi; these days, of course, in becoming a bit more plausible it’s another lightning rod and I made efforts to keep my thoughts amused. I have reminded myself this wasn’t just the sort of movie that could be called science fiction but one by the British studio Ealing Studios, another thing I’m less acquainted with in general.