The 'Maggie'

Here Ealing's foremost director was ostensibly making his statutory contribution to the studio's 'old crock' cycle that had begun the previous year with The Titfield Thunderbolt. But the cruel comedy of a rich Yank being slowly tormented by the canny crew of an ancient Scots cargo boat - it's transporting his furniture to a new holiday home, a commission undertaken only to save the boat from the scrapyard - gave Mackendrick and Ealing's resident American writer William Rose latitude to explore, in both autobiographical and wider cultural terms, the contradictions of the Old World and the New. Tradition and continuity become questionable values, the battle lines are blurred in comparison with those of Whisky Galore!, and typically of the director of the subsequent High Wind in Jamaica and Sammy Going South, it is the young cabin boy who is the most ambivalent character.