THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

This 1951 comedy starring Alec Guinness has a weird science-fiction premise to it, the possibility of creating a synthetic cloth that never wears out.  

Sidney Stratton (Guinness) is obsessed with the idea, and given that he might be a brilliant scientist (rather than a simple crackpot) maybe he's the one to invent such a cloth. 

No-one though is prepared to back his ideas so he has to get himself employed at textile mills in order to carry out experiments surreptitiously, before then getting fired when he is discovered.

This is the pattern until he meets Daphne Birnley (played by the delightful Joan Greenwood) who thinks he might be on to something and persuades her father, who owns a mill, to give him all the resources he needs.

Cue a series of comic explosions, but then (eureka) Sidney succeeds!  It will revolutionise the clothing industry and Mr Birnley is all set to tell the press of this amazing breakthrough.  Not only is the cloth indestructible but it repels dirt as well.  Sidney hasn't yet worked out how to include dyes in the manufacturing process which is why for the moment he has a white suit.

But at this point a group of very concerned mill owners enter the scene to point out to Mr Birnley that this new material will destroy the viability of their business model which (as they see it) depends on consumers buying replacement clothes.  It then turns out that the workers committee has the exact same concern.  

(Curiously none of them seem to have noticed that women people buy new clothes before they need to, simply to wear something new or because fashions change).

As an economics graduate this got me musing about the role of technological change and the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy.  Put simply, anything that increases productivity is to the general good but may in the short-term be bad for specific sectors of the economy or for specific groups of workers.

Anyway back to the film, which gets increasingly farcical with the representatives of both capital and labour trying to buy Sidney off or simply imprison him. 

Eventually the situation is resolved quite quickly and surprisingly when it turns out that the new miracle cloth is in fact the opposite of indestructible, given that it suddenly starts disintegrating.  

So Sidney is sent on his way, but just to make the ending not too downbeat it is hinted that he hasn’t given up and that he might eventually succeed.

The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar which strikes me as excessive.  It’s all a bit predictable for my taste with not a lot to elevate it, except for a couple of scenes near the end in which Joan Greenwood excels, but even she can't do a lot with her thinly drawn character.

Alec Guinness turns in exactly the sort of performance you might expect, but more colourless than usual thanks to the script, and the same is true of Cecil Parker as the pompous and ineffectual Mr Birnley.  

RATING: x Curb Your Enthusiasm