Alec Guinness as The Man In The White Suit, Alexander MacKendrick, 1951
Tony Curtis with Sharon Tate in Don’t Make Waves, Alexander MacKendrick, 1967
Surely I can’t be the first person to have picked this up. The only thing that messes up the symmetry is that while Waves is MacKendrick’s final film as director, Suit is not his first but his second film as director (the first was Whisky Galore!/Tight Little Island).
UPDATE: Several commenters have indirectly solicited my assessment of the latter film, which was recently made available via the indespensible albeit slightly irritating (because they’re indespensible—it’s a loop, you see) Warner Archive. I dig it. It doesn’t have the verbal assets of such prime MacKendrick fare as White Suit, Sweet Smell of Success, and others, and there’s a good deal of technical roughness around its edges, but it’s pretty fascinatingly acerbic, Tate is wonderful in it, and the climactic scene should have been watched by Michael Bay before he tackled the folding-skyscraper sequence in Transformers: Bark At The Moon, or whatever the hell it was called. My old friend Joseph Failla has some notes on the film that are not inapt, complete with illustrations:
“It took awhile but when I caught up with DON’T MAKE WAVES, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. While I have a liking for some of the sillier beach movies, WAVES as directed by Mackendrick seemed to have more on it’s mind, basically skewering many American values of excess. This would make a good double feature with the incredibly acidic THE LOVED ONE,also helmed by an English director taking an even angrier aim at the same subject (in fact both films feature a sequence with valuable beach front property precariously teetering on the edge of destruction).
“I realize to call DON’T MAKE WAVES the LA DOLCE VITA of beach films is a stretch, although the these pics from both movies underscore an interesting affinity, I think. I may not have picked up on the white suits, but I find Tony Curtis makes for a decent Marcello Mastroianni, American style (think of Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS as a more smarmy counterpart to Mastroianni’s famous paparazzi, Marcello Rubini from VITA). While the inclusion of Claudia Cardinale reminds me of the presence of a European’s eye view of the sweet life in ’60s southern California. You may not feel both films should be mentioned in the same conversation but is there not a similar glint in Curtis’ eye for Cardinale that Mastroianni has for Ekberg?”
If any film has been more elevated by an ingenious sound-effect than MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, I haven’t seen it yet.
I love several of MacKendrick’s films but I’ve never seen Don’t Make Waves. Is it better than its reputation?
Don’t Make Waves is watchable, but speaking as a MacKendrick fan, I would still suspect if you saw it without knowing the director credit, you’d have a hard time distinguishing it from many of Curtis’ sixties vehicles.
Stephen’s probably right, but I had a lot of fun with DON’T MAKE WAVES when I saw it a few years ago. Would need to see it again to put in context with Mackendrick’s other work, now that I’ve read his book and a bio about him.
Mackendrick’s an odd one for me. Great Ealing films, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, and also, by the way, a total butchering (probably not his fault) of Richard Hughes’s A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. Co-starring Martin Amis, though, so it’s certainly a curiosity. But a great novel was turned into a big fat zero nothing.
Let’s see…brilliant yet disinfranchised director with none of the pull of a blake edwards or stanley kubrick signs up with marty ransohoff circa mgm 1966/67 with Curtis,Cardinale,Tate and Sahl= Masterpiece.
Doesn’t the Maltin book say something like, “The one good Tony Curtis sixties comedy out of a hundred bad ones” about DON’T MAKE WAVES? I haven’t seen all hundred but I enjoy it even if I wouldn’t exactly consider the film to be a thematic followup to SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS or whatever. Plus it’s got Claudia Cardinale and Sharon Tate, so it’s ok by me.
Well, there was that film of Rhinoceros that never got made; so symmetry restored in a kind of absurdist fashion, I suppose.
Mackendrick’s one of my absolute favorites all the way till the end, so thanks for keeping an eye open to the pleasures and surprises of a movie too many write off as an embarrassing footnote.
don’t make waves is shampoo before shampoo.
Thanks, everyone, for the comments. I’ll definitely be checking it out, then.
At the very least it can’t be any worse than A High Wind in Jamaica (unfortunately, I share bill’s assessment on that one).
I love A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA, but I haven’t read the highly regarded novel, so there’s that.
haice: Good call on the DON’T MAKE WAVES/SHAMPOO comparison.
Izayah Branstetter
Great article.Really thank you! Keep writing.
Anyone with access to ‘Sight & Sound’ back issues, August 1994’s MacKendrick tribute / retrospective is worth a read.
Don’t Make Waves also kind of reminded me of STAY HUNGRY
It would help if somebody reordered the scenes of High Wind to put it back in sequence – incomprehensible studio interference messed with it. A “We don’t like what this film is doing, so let’s have it do it less effectively” kind of re-edit.
The account of its making in Lethal Innocence, the Mackendrick bio (as indispensable as On Film-making) is hugely entertaining.
Mackendrick was an American in England and a Scotsman in America, hence his persistent outsider’s eye.
Uncredited script work on Don’t Make Waves: Terry Southern.