Whiskey Galore!

WHISKEY GALORE! is Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick's first film and first contribution to the popular, distinctly British Ealing Studio comedies of the 1940s and 1950s (PASSPORT TO PIMLICO, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS). On the remote Outer Hebrides island of Todday, the inhabitants are happily immune to WWII until their ration of beloved whisky runs dry. Gloom settles over the island with this fate worse than "war and pestilence." Nonetheless, Sergeant Odd (Bruce Seton) asks to marry his sweetheart, Peggy (Joan Greenwood), while timid schoolteacher George (Gordon Jackson) requests her sister Catriona's (Gabrielle Blunt) hand. The men face opposition from the girls' father, Joseph Macroon (Wylie Watson), a crotchety, vague man preoccupied with the absent "water of life." Fate intervenes one foggy night when the S.S. Cabinet Minister, a cargo ship laden with 50,000 cases of whiskey runs aground off Todday. The elated male islanders plan to raid the ship, but must contend with dimwitted, overly dutiful Captain Waggett (Basil Radford) of the Home Guard. With a hilarious series of thwarted plans, car chases, and devious uses of guard equipment, the islanders vie to evade Waggett and his excise g-men in this spirited, tongue-in-cheek winner.