WHISKY GALORE! – Review

WHISKY GALORE! screens Friday, May 19th through Sunday May 21st at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). The movie starts each evening at 8:00pm. 

Review by Mark Longden

“Whisky Galore!” is a beloved movie from 1949, one of the Ealing comedies that define a specific moment in post-war British culture (my personal favourite is “The Ladykillers”). Based on the 1947 novel of the same name, with a script written by the novelist, it was a lot of fun; presumably, the list of “movies people loved from long ago” was running a little short of ones that hadn’t already been remade, so almost 70 years later, we come to this.

During World War 2, and for a surprisingly long time afterwards (it didn’t fully finish until the 1950s), Britain went through rationing. Families were given set amounts of various products and expected to make do, although there was a black market for certain products, as there always is. Anyway, when the movie was made, its audience would have still been living under those privations, now, all those years later, the number of people who lived through it is rather small, and to the rest of us, it’s a strange historical curio. People had to make do without things? Really?

Which is why, perhaps, the remake of “Whisky Galore!” (stuck in development hell for over a decade, for some reason) is such a curious movie. Set on the tiny Scottish island of Todday, there’s the postmaster Macroon (Gregor Fisher) and his two daughters Peggy and Catriona (Naomi Battrick and Ellie Kendrick); Peggy is in love with local teacher George (Kevin Guthrie) and Catriona with dashing returning soldier Sergeant Odd (Sean Biggerstaff). There’s a strict Sabbatarian minister (the great James Cosmo); a friendly doctor (John Sessions, looking like an over-inflated John Sessions balloon) and the head of the local Home Guard, Captain Wagget (Eddie Izzard). When the boat, the SS Cabinet Minister, grounds itself on the rocks just off the coast of the village, with 50,000 bottles of whisky on board, the stage is set for a tussle between the apparently dangerously alcoholic people of the village and the forces of authority – the Vicar refuses to let them go and rescue the whisky on Sunday and Wagget wants the stolen produce returned.

One could populate this review with a number of words for “quaint”. Everything about it feels old-fashioned and gentle, as if the sole audience for the movie was extremely frail old people who couldn’t be surprised or made to feel any remotely negative emotions. One might ask, as certain scenes are lifted almost verbatim from the 1949 version, why they bothered to remake it at all. There is literally no-one in the world, and I include the people who made this, who’ll think it’s superior to the original.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as director Gillies MacKinnon has spent most of the last decade in TV, it feels like a double episode of a TV show. If you like chocolate-box style visuals of village life which probably never existed (where are the people who do all the hard work?) then it looks quite nice, I suppose, but there’s nothing about it which sets it above one of the better TV shows set in rural Scotland, such as the Robert Carlyle-starring “Hamish Macbeth”.

Scriptwriter Peter Macdougall, who’s had a wonderful and interesting career, hasn’t written anything for the screen in over 20 years, but one would hope with his background he’d have picked something with a little more bite than this. In fact, it’s a movie littered with people who’ve done far better – Fisher (TV classic “Rab C Nesbitt”), Izzard (standup and tons of interesting TV and movie work), Sessions (a life of improv comedy), and Cosmo (every movie or show that ever needed a large bearded Scotsman), all ought to have known what they were letting themselves in for.

If you want a movie that is so gentle it wouldn’t stand up to even a mild breeze, then “Whisky Galore!” is for you. If, on the other hand, you’re sick and tired of beloved works of the past being regurgitated for us, as if new ideas and entertainments are impossible, then it might be best to stay away.

2 ½ of 5 Stars

Admission is:

$6 for the general public
$5 for seniors, Webster alumni and students from other schools
$4 for Webster University staff and faculty

Free for Webster students with proper I.D.

Advance tickets are available from the cashier before each screening or contact the Film Series office (314-246-7525) for more options. The Film Series can only accept cash or check.
The Webster University Film Series site can be found HERE

http://www.webster.edu/film-series/