High and Dry (J. Arthur Rank; United Artists). Laughter has always been known as healing, but in recent years the world's moviegoers have learned to call it—with an increasingly British accent—Baling. In the last five years, Executive Producer Michael Balcon has created at Baling Studios, a J. Arthur Rank affiliate just outside London, a comedy factory that puts out more and better humor than any place since Hollywood in the silent days. In such marvelously handwrought hilarities as Tight Little Island, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Titfield Thunderbolt, the Baling people have created, for the first time, an inimitably English screen style: "the little comedy." (Ealing's three Alec Guinness comedies alone have probably grossed about $2,250,000 in U.S. theaters.)
Alexander Mackendrick's High and Dry is very possibly the funniest Baling comedy to date, a picture as salty and Scottish as a whelk in the Firth of Forth. A sort of sister picture to his Tight Little Island, this one might be called a tragedy of plumbing.
Mr. Calvin B. Marshall (Paul Douglas), an American who is the London vice president of a big airline, buys an island off the Scottish coast, and renovates the castle as an anniversary surprise for his wife—they haven't been getting along, and he thinks that, well, maybe what they both need is a castle. The difficulty is, shipping is scarce in the Hebrides, and nobody can be found to cart the last £4,000 worth of plumbing to the island in time for the great day. Nobody, that is, but Captain MacTaggert (Alex Mackenzie) of the puffer Maggie.
Now a puffer is a boat that has to be seen to be adequately disbelieved. A tiny Scottish freighter that carries a small crew (the Maggie has four) and barely enough freight to make ends meet, it looks like nothing so much as a seagoing haggis, and not a very clean one at that. When Douglas realizes that his precious plumbing has actually been shipped in such a boat, he rushes to the rescue with a full panoply of American Efficiency: chartered planes, long-distance calls, press conferences, do-it-yourself. He is met by Scots Canniness: the wandering eye, the mislaid wallet, the pensive loiter, the unprevented calamity.
Efficiently and cannily, Producer Balcon takes the situation — and the spectator — for one lighthearted laugh after another, until, of course, the Scots crew gets the last laugh. Actor Douglas does astonishingly well to hold his own in such fast comic company. Alex Mackenzie, an actor who taught school in Clydebank until he was 61, is a grizzled old Scots beauty, and he can "throw a tub to a whale" (the Scottish phrase, aptly enough, for sharp practice) like few men since Sir Harry Lauder. Hubert Gregg makes a sopping good Milquetoast as Douglas' male secretary, who is haplessly stationed aboard the Maggie to see that the boss's orders are carried out. And the bonny little fiend of a cabin boy, Tommy Kearins, with his soup-bowl haircut and that grand commercial light in his eye, is every dirty inch the Huck Finn of the Hebrides.