Classic (and cheap!) Ealing Comedy Screenings: WHISKY GALORE Mon 20 Feb and THE LADYKILLERS Mon 5 Ma

We’re bringing classic Ealing Comedies back to the big screen at Hackney Picturehouse to lighten the start  of the week! Join us on Monday 20 February at 6.45 for a screening of WHISKY GALORE plus introduction from film expert Graham Rinaldi.Tickets only £6! Classic Ealing comedy about the no-holds barred battle waged by a Hebridean island community, parched by wartime shortages, determined to put a shipwrecked cargo of whisky to proper use before officialdom can lay claim to it.Reminiscent of PASSPORT TO PIMLICO in its amiable puncturing of bureaucracy, but a good deal sharper as a parable of colonialism, with the Scots contriving a humiliating double-edged comeuppance for their English laird and master (Radford).Delightful characterisations and beautiful locations on the island of Barra. On Monday 5 March at 6.45 we’ll be showing THE LADYKILLERS, again with introduction from film expert Graham Rinaldi. Tickets £6. Mackendrick and Ealing’s resident American writer William Rose had already collaborated on THE MAGGIE when they came together again for this, the last, most enduring and best known of all the studio’s comedies, in which the sheer blackness of the central concept is barely disguised by the accomplished farce which surrounds it. Katie Johnson, the innocent hostess to a gang who find it easier to silence each other than her, proves resistant to science (Guinness’s fanged ‘Professor’), strategy (Parker’s ‘Major’) and all shades of brute force as she unwittingly foils a criminal getaway that never reaches beyond St Pancras. A finely wrought image of terminal stasis, national, political (Charles Barr suggested the gang represents the first post-war Labour government), and/or creative (the house as Ealing, Johnson as Balcon?). Whatever, Mackendrick immediately upped for America and the equally dark ironies of SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. For more information or to join the mailing list email elinor.w@picturehouses.co.uk