THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (1951). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures

NOT many movies are more charming and amusing than the 1951 British comedy, “The Man in the White Suit,” available for free viewing on the Internet Archive.

Starring Alec Guinness before he became Alec Guinness (the megastar), this Ealing Studios classic provides some gentle and truthful commentary on industrial capitalism. The witty script, written by Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick (who also directed the film) is about a young textile chemist, played by Guinness, who after much trial and error in the laboratory invents an indestructible, synthetic fabric. It’s an unusual subject that takes you into a little-celebrated world and laboratories with absurdly bubbling and glowing test tubes. There’s just enough exaggeration and just enough realism to make a great screen tale.

From Wikipedia:

Sidney (“Sid”) Stratton, a brilliant young research chemist and former Cambridge scholarship recipient, has been dismissed from jobs at several textile mills in the north of England because of his demands for expensive facilities and his obsession with inventing an everlasting fibre. Whilst working as a labourer at the Birnley Mills, he accidentally becomes an unpaid researcher and invents an incredibly strong fibre which repels dirt and never wears out. From this fabric, a suit is made—which is brilliant white because it cannot absorb dye and slightly luminous because it includes radioactive elements.

Stratton is lauded as a genius until both management and the trade unions realise the consequence of his invention; once consumers have purchased enough cloth, demand will drop precipitously and put the textile industry out of business. The managers try to trick and bribe Stratton into signing away the rights to his invention but he refuses. Managers and workers each try to shut him away, but he escapes.

The bosses negotiate with Daphne, the daughter of the owner of Birnley Mills, that she will trick Stratton into giving it all up and she asks £5000 for this, but when she meets Stratton she has a change of heart and encourages him to announce his invention to the press. Going back to his rooms he is confronted by a woman who he thought was on his side, but suddenly realises that no-one wants his invention.

The climax sees Stratton running through the streets at night in his glowing white suit, pursued by both the managers and the employees.

Cecil Parker, an actor known for characters who are alternately supercilious and bumbling, plays the industrialist, Mr. Birnley. Joan Greenwood is his seductive daughter and Vida Hope is the tough trade union’s shop steward who befriends Stratton but then turns on him in favor of union jobs. Also not to be missed and thoroughly enjoyable is Ernest Thesiger as the cunning, elderly industrialist, Sir John Kierlaw. There are two especially memorable bit characters, a little girl played by Mandy Miller and the elderly landlady, Mrs Watson, played by Edie Martin. The latter is classic Ealing Studios as in just a few moments she conveys a parsimonious, lower-class British landlady so well it is hard to believe the actress wasn’t just that. All the acting is first-rate. Guinness has a deadpan delivery that is much more subtle than his more famous roles.

This is British theater, translated to the screen, at its finest, offering an enjoyable evening without violence or vulgarity. How many movies have you seen about the textile industry? It works, and I wish there were more.

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