Review of The Man in the White Suit (1951) by Edith N — 10 Apr 2011

A Flawed Treatise on the Dangers of Innovation.

Actually, I might well have done this as a tribute movie, had I gotten it last month. As is often the case in older movies, one of the people in it looked vaguely familiar. Fortunately, I always look at IMDB while I'm working on reviews anyway, and so I discovered that Michael Corland, one of the many executives running about the place, was in fact played by Michael Gough. He was one of two people to appear in all four of the Burton-Schumacher [i]Batman[/i] movies, wherein he played Alfred. In fact, he retired from acting long since, but the only thing which appears certain to have prevented him from being willing to come out of retirement again to work with Tim Burton again is that he died last month at the age of ninety-four. He was never really a leading man type, but he was a fine character actor and quite good at playing Wise Old Men for Tim Burton.

He isn't the leading man here, either. That's Sidney Stratton, played by Sir Alec Guinness. Sidney is a chemist whose interest lies in the field of polymers. However, he's your standard movie scientists, which means he is unable to explain to much of anyone what he's really doing. He gets a job working in a textile mill so he can sneak into the lab and use the equipment after he gets fired from the lab of a different textile mill. Finally, he creates the ultimate polymer. It is so durable that you actually have to burn it apart; it changes structure at a temperature of over three hundred degrees. It repels dirt; he gets a smudge of oil on the eponymous suit and removes it with a wipe and an obvious cut. The suit is indestructible and doesn't get dirty. Oh, they haven't worked out how to produce any colour but white, but he can work on that. Only management and labour alike figure they're about to be put out of a job, because no one will ever need to buy clothes again!

Frankly, the only person I figure has a right to be concerned is the little old lady who takes in washing. Everyone else goes crazy, because people will only buy one more wardrobe, out of the new fabric, and never buy clothes again. Never have to. Except people don't work like that. People don't want to wear the same clothing for the rest of their lives. Oh, and of course the population's going up, so there will always be new people to buy the material. And even though they say they will be able to fiddle with the weave so it duplicates cotton, wool, and silk, people still buy silk even though there are cheaper man-made alternatives. The Real Thing has a certain appeal. Fashion will continue to change, so people will need different clothes as hemlines and lapels change shape over and over again. Really, I found myself hoping the stuff recycles, because that's a heck of a pile of indestructible clothes after a while. Though I suppose it could be reused for a whole range of industrial purposes.

But of course you're not supposed to think about these things. Sidney, because he is not considering consequences, is going to destroy an entire industry. That's what you're supposed to think about. It's a satire based on the idea of the pure scientist who needs to get out of the lab more often. He is unworldly, and he needs looking after. Doubtless he will end up with Daphne Birnley (Joan Greenwood) doing just that. Hopefully, she'll stop him before he destroys an industry again. Not that he does this time, of course, but through no fault of his own. There's a safety net built in so such people don't exceed their reach. Something always goes wrong. However, those wacky fellows will keep trying until they succeed, and someone needs to keep an eye on them so they don't. Honestly, I find the intended message a little distasteful. You Can't Trust Science. It only works, though, if you assume every scientist is as unmindful of consequences as Sidney, and remember all the other scientists think he's crazy, too.

Still, the movie is entertaining enough to spend an afternoon on. Sir Alec Guinness jaunts about doing his Sir Alec Guinness thing. The suit doesn't get put on until about the last twenty minutes, after which he spends most of the movie shut up in one room or another by people trying to prevent him from publishing his secret. Really, Sidney's biggest flaw does seem to be that he can't explain himself to anyone. Daphne has the good sense to haul out the [i]Encyclopaedia Britannica[/i] to look up everything he told her, having smiled and nodded through an earlier conversation. He ends up surrounded by union mill hands in part because it makes things wackier, I think, and because it then lets us see that They Aren't So Different After All. The conflict between Daphne and Bertha (Vida Hope) which I was anticipating never did come, which is just as well for both. He'd never have noticed what was going on anyway.