The 'Maggie'

I feel extremely fortunate to have finally caught up with this beguiling little film. Good enough to rank among Ealing's best works, it has undoubtedly improved with age, giving us a snapshot of a time before technology shrank and homogenized our world.

It's worth noting that this film is the work of screenwriter William Rose, who had created the delightful Genevieve a year earlier, and would go on, amazingly, to pen It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World some ten years later, and win an Oscar for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner a few years after that.

It's unfortunate that movie fans track actors and directors so much more closely than writers. The Maggie, no less than his other works, proves that Rose deserves to be remembered one of the great geniuses of film comedy.

I don't recollect seeing any mention of it in the credits of the film nor in any of the comments on this site however "The Maggie" is very obviously based on "The Vital Spark".

Neil Munro wrote "The Vital Spark" in 1906, the collected tales of Master Mariner Para Handy and his Clyde puffer The Vital Spark which he had previously had published as articles in the Looker On column of the Glasgow Evening News. On board were McPhail the engineer, Dougie the deck hand and Sunny Jim the cabin boy. Neil Munro went on to write more columns and collated these into two further books detailing Para Handy's exploits and misdeeds while travelling the coastline of Scotland. Much later writer Stuart Donald took up the baton and wrote three further volumes of Para Handy's tales, a brave thing to do considering the place in Scottish popular culture.

The BBC Scotland made a small run of TV programmes in the late 1960's and early 1970's which were revisited in 1994 by Gregor Fisher (Rab C Nesbitt and the Baldy Man) in the two series of "The Tales of Para Handy".

Anyone familiar with Neil Munro's work would recognise the characters on board The Maggie in an instant. They may have different names but the characters are identical.

The Maggie. An underrated, gentle little comedy, the sort of which Ealing are associated with. The storyline packs quite a punch on American capitalism as a tycoon gets to believe that, after cutting corners and underestimating the crew of the 'Maggie', he can buy out his mistake with dollars alone.

Great cast that play a Clydeside crew, that quietly and cannily let things gently take their course. The scenery is more Whisky Galore than the East-end that is the more usual home of Ealing and the nice black and white photography suits the subject well. Pacing is a far cry from the frenetic of The Lavender Hill Mob and lets it story breathe quietly.

It's one of my favourite Ealings. If you haven't seen it, give it a try, you might add it to yours, too!

Here's another entertaining Ealing Comedy from the early 50's. The tale is simple, gruff but wealthy American Calvin B Thomson is desperate to get a minor flotilla of valuable goods to his fiancé on the out of the way island of Kilterra from the River Clyde in Glasgow. With no other boat available, he's inveigled by the crafty captain of an old sea puffer on its last legs to use his old boat for the trip in exchange for a much needed considerable fee.

They all eventually get there, if not with the cargo, by a somewhat circuitous route, not without some hair-brained, hair-raising and hair-pulling-out happenings along the way, the journey symbolic of the relationship between the big-mouthed Yank and the couthy crew of the old "Maggie". From the start, Thomson, played with much personality by Paul Douglas, is sceptical and mistrusting of the laid-back captain, as happy with a drink in his hand as the drink beneath him, but they never quite come to the blows you expect them to and by the time of the delivery of the story's moral, something along the lines of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", something approaching grudging respect is fostered between them, although it needs the constant interference of the twinkle-eyed ship's boy to help them get that far.

The humour is gentle, the photography very fine indeed and the acting by all is also very good. There's a nice interlude between Douglas and a bonnie Scots lass as they discuss matters of the heart, but the main thrust of the film is the canny contrariness of the down-at-heel locals pitted against the bombast of the cash-flashing American. The story is a bit episodic and I'm not sure I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the duped American, as he's continually gulled by his transporters plus I was waiting for a bigger finish than I think I got.

Nevertheless, it was a sheer delight for me to see vintage film of two places where I have had homes, namely the River Clyde which I can see from my front window today and the Crinan Canal near where I lived for a couple of years some 25 years ago and which I revisited and walked around last year on my birthday. "The Maggie" may not be the best of the Ealing Comedies but it stays afloat throughout and gets to its ending in an acceptably ship-shape fashion.

Despite its age this was an excellent old film. It can't fail to entertain virtually everyone.

It's about a dying way of life, with different pace and priorities, but a life they love. This old way of life clashes with a newer way of life with a different pace and priorities.

The often drunken and flawed captain and crew drift through life enjoying themselves, but usually on the wrong side of the law. Ironically often looked after by the youngest member of the crew; the wee boy.

As a result of desperation and deviousness they pick up a cargo from an American tycoon, which they hope will save their little ship for another day. The story centres around trying to deliver the cargo and their battles and clashes with the American.

As well as being an excellent film, the social history is excellent also.