Whisky Galore – review

High spirits: Basil Radford in Whisky Galore. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on.

Whisky GaloreProduction year: 1949Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 81 minsDirectors: Alexander MackendrickCast: Basil Radford, Joan GreenwoodMore on this film

In the first, Passport to Pimlico, a London borough, supported by a recently discovered medieval document, declares itself to be part of ancient Burgundy and thus an independent state. In the second, Whisky Galore, the thirsty inhabitants of a remote Scottish village hijack the cargo of a whisky-laden merchantman wrecked on their shores during the second world war and defy the authorities to repossess it. The third film, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, has as its hero a bitterly aggrieved Victorian outcast from an aristocratic family who avenges his mother's death by killing all the relatives between himself and a seat in the Lords.

The populist politics of discontent were later to be identified as Poujadism, a term attached to a short-lived revolt of the petite bourgeoisie against the stifling bureaucracy of France's Fourth Republic, and led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade in 1953. These Ealing films were skilfully scripted, visually observant and performed by what we now see as a rep company of stars and character actors, and a collegial team working behind the camera.

The comedies were part of their times and yet transcend them – they live on to comment on later eras. Whisky Galore, for instance, based on a novel by the early Scottish nationalist Compton Mackenzie, is a colourful contribution to the current debate on the future of Scotland.

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