Whisky Galore!

17/05/2026

Film    Download PDF  
Whisky Galore! starts with its absence. A war is on, and the locals on the island of Todday have run out of the water of life. In Gaelic, it is called Uisge Beatha, but better known as Scotch or whisky. The island is surely a play on a toddy, and the director Alexander Mackendrick approaches the material as a discerning outsider and a knowing insider. Mackendrick was born in the US, spent his formative years in Glasgow, and always seemed to have a leg on either side of the Atlantic. He would make five films for Ealing in the UK, and one of the great satires of the newspaper industry in the US, Sweet Smell of Success. Yet though he would go on to make a film that was based on the conflicts between canny locals and can-do Americans (The Maggie), here the contrast is between the wily and witless, with the locals knowing how to get one over Captain Waggett (Basil Rathbone): a posh and pompous English gent, who can’t seem to get a handle on the locals, whose customs aren’t so much alien, he finds, as double-jointed. Whenever he looks like he should be winning an argument with plain good sense, he is met by a twisted logic that leaves him in a flap. The English sergeant, on the island to support the locals in their attempt to keep the island safe, is better at understanding the necessary customs. When he guards an important stash, he helps them overcome him, aware that protecting a ship full of whisky is a fool’s errand, and the locals will likely be smarter than he is. It might also rest on his turning native himself: he wishes to marry a local lass, Peggy (Joan Greenwood)
There are several such moments with wise locals proving more capable than one might think, and they not only define the film, but perhaps also much of Scottish cinema since. This might at first seem like the coagulation of cliches, a work that has had a detrimental influence on Scottish culture as it narrows it down to some tropes that have become stale with time: locals outsmarting outsiders with cockeyed reasoning; workshy folks looking for the easiest of lives, and people always up for a dram.  Yet this would be to blame Whisky Galore! for aspects that were already in place. After all, the film is based on Compton Mackenzie’s novel from 1947, and the film shares similarities with Michael Powell’s 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going. In the latter film, Joan is an uptight Englishwoman with her life laid out for her as she will marry an industrialist on a Hebridean island, only to fall for another man when the weather won’t allow her to reach her final destination. To be too dismissive of Whisky Galore! would also risk underestimating a potentially positive dimension to what Colin McArthur so aptly and famously called The Scottish Discursive Unconscious.  As McArthur says, ‘these are images, tones, rhetorical tropes, and ideological tendencies, often within utterances promulgated decades (sometimes even a century or more) apart.’ (Cinema, Culture, Scotland) Clearly, if they can cover centuries, they can’t only be laid at the cinema’s door, even if film may promote this image globally. With I Know Where I’m Going, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Wee Geordie, The Maggie and Brigadoon, within a decade after WWII, Scotland had a cottage industry that was at the same time based on productions far beyond home-grown material. These were films made or produced by Americans or the English, and we might wish that if cliches are to be evident at all, they should be grown from and in native soil.
But this would be to misconstrue two things. Firstly, there is no reason why self-production would have any intrinsic value, since what is more significant is that images are part of culture, and culture is based on an abstraction. In other words, whether it is putting on screen the American Civil War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the D-Day landings, any represented event takes on a form that separates itself from the reality from whence it comes. It is not that someone experiences an event that makes it authentic;  otherwise, all those films based on true stories would be the best, but how that experience is shaped into an aesthetic purpose. Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon remade Whisky Galore! in 2016, but it wasn’t an improvement as it fell into the tropes without expanding them. To offer authenticity, whatever this precisely means, rests on what one does with the representations, not some assumption about the person being Scottish, as if the congenital fact will result in a better film.
The second point follows from the first: what matters is that a filmmaker can take these abstract representations and make them perceptually fresh. A Scottish filmmaker, remaking a film by an American interloper, is only of any value if there is something that was missing from the original that a local can bring out that the outsider has missed. If we prefer Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! over MacKinnon’s, it rests on Mackendrick being better able to work with the conventions, and indeed help harden them into convention. Mackinnon adds little that doesn’t simply harden them into cliché. If he could have undermined the conventions or found texture in them, this would have been a worthy endeavour. But few would surely claim that simply remaking Whisky Galore! with a Scottish filmmaker is of much value if it does nothing to make fresh those representations in one form or another. What we can insist on, though, is that there can be positives extracted from the tropes the film helped generate and exacerbate, with Local Hero and The Wicker Man better at generating freshness within potential staleness than MacKinnon’s remake.
But let us concentrate on Mackendrick’s take on the cockeyed logic, workshyness, and the taste for spirits. When Captain Waggett goes round to his assistant, George, his mother answers the door and insists that George Campbell won’t be allowed out. He has been locked in his bedroom with bread, cheese and the bible. She invokes the 4th commandment and that Georges isn’t going anywhere on the Sabbath after he has argued with his mother. Wagstaff says that at this very moment, the troops are fighting the Germans in North Africa as an attempt to get her to see reason, and that George is needed for the homeland cause. The mother is having none of it: what the Germans do is on their own conscience, and Todday is not North Africa ‘‘so there is no reason to bring the heathens into it. I’ve heard there are cannibals in Africa, but nobody is going to persuade my son to eat human flesh.’’
Her argument is as sound as it is wrong-headed, and the exasperated Waggett doesn’t really have any strong case of his own, so to speak, as all he wants George to do is help him protect the boat that has run ashore with cases and cases of whisky. This isn’t an imminent German attack; it is merely keeping the water of life from the locals, even if it means all the whisky will end up in a watery grave at the bottom of the sea. George’s mother might not be in cahoots with the locals looking to save the cargo, but from Wagget’s perspective, she is yet another local conspiring against him. The mother’s cockeyed logic works with the film’s dramatic irony: the teetotal mother won’t let George out of the house to help the captain defend the boat, and her strict attitude helps the locals to get to the ship, and load up the whisky on small rowing boats.
 Not that George would have been keen to help the captain, though he does, like the other locals, observe the Sabbath. The moment the hand strikes midnight, they are all out rescuing the boxes, just as Wagstaff sets his alarm for the morning, sure that they won’t be doing anything in the middle of the night. If Mrs Campbell observes the Sabbath and all Wagstaff can see is the stupidity of local mores, then he is the stupid one when he thinks that the moment the Sabbath has passed, they won’t be out of bed and seizing the new day. The locals’ reasoning procedures might not coincide with Wagstaff’s assumptions, but whether defending the commandments with the Puritanism of Mrs Campbell, or pragmatically, like the others, they manage to wrong-foot the captain.
A common trope in Scottish (and especially Highland and island focused) fiction, in film and literature, is that the locals are lazy and lack ambition. As John Prebble noted, many from the south would look on Highlanders and saw that ‘‘no new comfort worth the possessing which was to be acquired at the price of industry; no improvement worthy of adaptation if it was obtained at the expense of sacrificing the customs or leaving the hovels of their ancestors.’’ (The Highland Clearances) This was ‘’congenital idleness.’’  Douglas Dunn plays on this in a short story, where the narrator says ‘‘I am as lazy as any man born. Part of my trouble is that I have become content enough on plain victuals in modest quantities and two packets of Players a week.’’ (‘The Canoes’) In another work, from another perspective, the idea that there are men of working and fighting age, half-heartedly defending the homeland, might suggest cowardice. But Mackendrick, like many others playing into the trope, views instead people who have little interest in the worldly. And if someone isn’t much interested in the worldly, then why would they be too concerned with a World War?
This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t defend themselves; just that they see no reason to be especially bothered by events far from their island. Again, this could be viewed as a parochial limitation, but part of the trope of the idle is that it contains the presence of the idyll. Highland and island life is a place outside the hustle and bustle, the pace and purpose of contemporary living. It is what Joan finds when she heads north in I Know Where I’m Going, and what McIntyre discovers when, in Local Hero, he gets sent over from the States to recce a possible oil refinery in a Scottish village.
From one perspective, we can view tired tropes of Scottish laziness, or see an existence predicated on community and resourcefulness. The locals here don’t see rescuing the whisky as an opportunity for personal gain, even if the bar owner might be a bit out of pocket. There he is with four bottles, his delayed quota, which would usually be quickly imbibed, but now he can’t sell the stuff with the recent glut. Yet everyone else who is drawn to a dram just wants to have fun and be merry.  They celebrate with a ceilidh, and once again we find a regular feature of Scottish cinema, but rather than viewing it as an obligatory scene that would be exemplified in the all-singing and dancing cliché compendium that was Brigadoon, better to see it (and Brigadoon) as the encapsulation of spirit that has a two-sided aspect in Scottish cultural life.
As the almost aptly named A.W. Beveridge would say of the booze, ‘‘It has been seen as the resort of the weak-minded and the cause of personal degradation. It has been portrayed as a response to and a symptom of social disintegration. It has been depicted as leading to delirium and psychosis. On a positive note it has been hailed as a source of inspiration and as a means of celebration.’’ (Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh) One side is turned towards despair, and often a low-land, post-industrial need to escape despondency by exacerbating it. In cinema, we find it in Ratcatcher, 16 Years of Alcohol, My Name is Joe and The Bill Douglas Trilogy. The other side accesses the spirited in the spirit, in Local  Hero, I Know Where I’m Going, Whisky Galore!, The Angel’s Share and, yes, Four Weddings and a Funeral. (Though the Scottish section was filmed in Surrey, the setting is Perthshire.)
While some might see in the former approach a greater sense of realism, this also risks containing within it a puritan punitiveness: as if to combat the tourist image of Scotland that these more positive films represent, it risks turning the idea of alcohol into a negative, as little good comes out of the imbibing in Ratcatcher or My Name is Joe. But what Whisky Galore! and others allow, is a national type that needn’t quite be a stereotype, even if it is one much more amenable to the Scottish tourist industry than the image of the despondent drinker. It can even suggest that within modern life, driven by industry and profit, materialism and wealth, there are pockets of benign resistance, seeing that to do little, have little, and make the most of the retreat from the crowds, can be very refreshing indeed. Shortly before the film ends, it looks like Wagstaff has been exporting the stuff himself, as six bottles have made it onto the mainland, and his wife bursts into uncontrollable laughter. She is now as spirited as the locals, and this needn’t rest on the drink. As the film concludes, the voiceover tells us that, in time, whisky became too expensive for the locals to buy, but that didn’t worry the sergeant and Peggy. They were not whisky drinkers, and ‘’if that isn’t a moral to the story, then what is?’’ Perhaps the final moral is that the island and Highland spirit needn’t be bottled, but that needn’t mean it is wrong if it happens to be.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Whisky Galore!

Whisky Galore! starts with its absence. A war is on, and the locals on the island of Todday have run out of the water of life. In Gaelic, it is called Uisge Beatha, but better known as Scotch or whisky. The island is surely a play on a toddy, and the director Alexander Mackendrick approaches the material as a discerning outsider and a knowing insider. Mackendrick was born in the US, spent his formative years in Glasgow, and always seemed to have a leg on either side of the Atlantic. He would make five films for Ealing in the UK, and one of the great satires of the newspaper industry in the US, Sweet Smell of Success. Yet though he would go on to make a film that was based on the conflicts between canny locals and can-do Americans (The Maggie), here the contrast is between the wily and witless, with the locals knowing how to get one over Captain Waggett (Basil Rathbone): a posh and pompous English gent, who can’t seem to get a handle on the locals, whose customs aren’t so much alien, he finds, as double-jointed. Whenever he looks like he should be winning an argument with plain good sense, he is met by a twisted logic that leaves him in a flap. The English sergeant, on the island to support the locals in their attempt to keep the island safe, is better at understanding the necessary customs. When he guards an important stash, he helps them overcome him, aware that protecting a ship full of whisky is a fool’s errand, and the locals will likely be smarter than he is. It might also rest on his turning native himself: he wishes to marry a local lass, Peggy (Joan Greenwood)
There are several such moments with wise locals proving more capable than one might think, and they not only define the film, but perhaps also much of Scottish cinema since. This might at first seem like the coagulation of cliches, a work that has had a detrimental influence on Scottish culture as it narrows it down to some tropes that have become stale with time: locals outsmarting outsiders with cockeyed reasoning; workshy folks looking for the easiest of lives, and people always up for a dram.  Yet this would be to blame Whisky Galore! for aspects that were already in place. After all, the film is based on Compton Mackenzie’s novel from 1947, and the film shares similarities with Michael Powell’s 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going. In the latter film, Joan is an uptight Englishwoman with her life laid out for her as she will marry an industrialist on a Hebridean island, only to fall for another man when the weather won’t allow her to reach her final destination. To be too dismissive of Whisky Galore! would also risk underestimating a potentially positive dimension to what Colin McArthur so aptly and famously called The Scottish Discursive Unconscious.  As McArthur says, ‘these are images, tones, rhetorical tropes, and ideological tendencies, often within utterances promulgated decades (sometimes even a century or more) apart.’ (Cinema, Culture, Scotland) Clearly, if they can cover centuries, they can’t only be laid at the cinema’s door, even if film may promote this image globally. With I Know Where I’m Going, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Wee Geordie, The Maggie and Brigadoon, within a decade after WWII, Scotland had a cottage industry that was at the same time based on productions far beyond home-grown material. These were films made or produced by Americans or the English, and we might wish that if cliches are to be evident at all, they should be grown from and in native soil.
But this would be to misconstrue two things. Firstly, there is no reason why self-production would have any intrinsic value, since what is more significant is that images are part of culture, and culture is based on an abstraction. In other words, whether it is putting on screen the American Civil War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the D-Day landings, any represented event takes on a form that separates itself from the reality from whence it comes. It is not that someone experiences an event that makes it authentic;  otherwise, all those films based on true stories would be the best, but how that experience is shaped into an aesthetic purpose. Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon remade Whisky Galore! in 2016, but it wasn’t an improvement as it fell into the tropes without expanding them. To offer authenticity, whatever this precisely means, rests on what one does with the representations, not some assumption about the person being Scottish, as if the congenital fact will result in a better film.
The second point follows from the first: what matters is that a filmmaker can take these abstract representations and make them perceptually fresh. A Scottish filmmaker, remaking a film by an American interloper, is only of any value if there is something that was missing from the original that a local can bring out that the outsider has missed. If we prefer Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! over MacKinnon’s, it rests on Mackendrick being better able to work with the conventions, and indeed help harden them into convention. Mackinnon adds little that doesn’t simply harden them into cliché. If he could have undermined the conventions or found texture in them, this would have been a worthy endeavour. But few would surely claim that simply remaking Whisky Galore! with a Scottish filmmaker is of much value if it does nothing to make fresh those representations in one form or another. What we can insist on, though, is that there can be positives extracted from the tropes the film helped generate and exacerbate, with Local Hero and The Wicker Man better at generating freshness within potential staleness than MacKinnon’s remake.
But let us concentrate on Mackendrick’s take on the cockeyed logic, workshyness, and the taste for spirits. When Captain Waggett goes round to his assistant, George, his mother answers the door and insists that George Campbell won’t be allowed out. He has been locked in his bedroom with bread, cheese and the bible. She invokes the 4th commandment and that Georges isn’t going anywhere on the Sabbath after he has argued with his mother. Wagstaff says that at this very moment, the troops are fighting the Germans in North Africa as an attempt to get her to see reason, and that George is needed for the homeland cause. The mother is having none of it: what the Germans do is on their own conscience, and Todday is not North Africa ‘‘so there is no reason to bring the heathens into it. I’ve heard there are cannibals in Africa, but nobody is going to persuade my son to eat human flesh.’’
Her argument is as sound as it is wrong-headed, and the exasperated Waggett doesn’t really have any strong case of his own, so to speak, as all he wants George to do is help him protect the boat that has run ashore with cases and cases of whisky. This isn’t an imminent German attack; it is merely keeping the water of life from the locals, even if it means all the whisky will end up in a watery grave at the bottom of the sea. George’s mother might not be in cahoots with the locals looking to save the cargo, but from Wagget’s perspective, she is yet another local conspiring against him. The mother’s cockeyed logic works with the film’s dramatic irony: the teetotal mother won’t let George out of the house to help the captain defend the boat, and her strict attitude helps the locals to get to the ship, and load up the whisky on small rowing boats.
 Not that George would have been keen to help the captain, though he does, like the other locals, observe the Sabbath. The moment the hand strikes midnight, they are all out rescuing the boxes, just as Wagstaff sets his alarm for the morning, sure that they won’t be doing anything in the middle of the night. If Mrs Campbell observes the Sabbath and all Wagstaff can see is the stupidity of local mores, then he is the stupid one when he thinks that the moment the Sabbath has passed, they won’t be out of bed and seizing the new day. The locals’ reasoning procedures might not coincide with Wagstaff’s assumptions, but whether defending the commandments with the Puritanism of Mrs Campbell, or pragmatically, like the others, they manage to wrong-foot the captain.
A common trope in Scottish (and especially Highland and island focused) fiction, in film and literature, is that the locals are lazy and lack ambition. As John Prebble noted, many from the south would look on Highlanders and saw that ‘‘no new comfort worth the possessing which was to be acquired at the price of industry; no improvement worthy of adaptation if it was obtained at the expense of sacrificing the customs or leaving the hovels of their ancestors.’’ (The Highland Clearances) This was ‘’congenital idleness.’’  Douglas Dunn plays on this in a short story, where the narrator says ‘‘I am as lazy as any man born. Part of my trouble is that I have become content enough on plain victuals in modest quantities and two packets of Players a week.’’ (‘The Canoes’) In another work, from another perspective, the idea that there are men of working and fighting age, half-heartedly defending the homeland, might suggest cowardice. But Mackendrick, like many others playing into the trope, views instead people who have little interest in the worldly. And if someone isn’t much interested in the worldly, then why would they be too concerned with a World War?
This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t defend themselves; just that they see no reason to be especially bothered by events far from their island. Again, this could be viewed as a parochial limitation, but part of the trope of the idle is that it contains the presence of the idyll. Highland and island life is a place outside the hustle and bustle, the pace and purpose of contemporary living. It is what Joan finds when she heads north in I Know Where I’m Going, and what McIntyre discovers when, in Local Hero, he gets sent over from the States to recce a possible oil refinery in a Scottish village.
From one perspective, we can view tired tropes of Scottish laziness, or see an existence predicated on community and resourcefulness. The locals here don’t see rescuing the whisky as an opportunity for personal gain, even if the bar owner might be a bit out of pocket. There he is with four bottles, his delayed quota, which would usually be quickly imbibed, but now he can’t sell the stuff with the recent glut. Yet everyone else who is drawn to a dram just wants to have fun and be merry.  They celebrate with a ceilidh, and once again we find a regular feature of Scottish cinema, but rather than viewing it as an obligatory scene that would be exemplified in the all-singing and dancing cliché compendium that was Brigadoon, better to see it (and Brigadoon) as the encapsulation of spirit that has a two-sided aspect in Scottish cultural life.
As the almost aptly named A.W. Beveridge would say of the booze, ‘‘It has been seen as the resort of the weak-minded and the cause of personal degradation. It has been portrayed as a response to and a symptom of social disintegration. It has been depicted as leading to delirium and psychosis. On a positive note it has been hailed as a source of inspiration and as a means of celebration.’’ (Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh) One side is turned towards despair, and often a low-land, post-industrial need to escape despondency by exacerbating it. In cinema, we find it in Ratcatcher, 16 Years of Alcohol, My Name is Joe and The Bill Douglas Trilogy. The other side accesses the spirited in the spirit, in Local  Hero, I Know Where I’m Going, Whisky Galore!, The Angel’s Share and, yes, Four Weddings and a Funeral. (Though the Scottish section was filmed in Surrey, the setting is Perthshire.)
While some might see in the former approach a greater sense of realism, this also risks containing within it a puritan punitiveness: as if to combat the tourist image of Scotland that these more positive films represent, it risks turning the idea of alcohol into a negative, as little good comes out of the imbibing in Ratcatcher or My Name is Joe. But what Whisky Galore! and others allow, is a national type that needn’t quite be a stereotype, even if it is one much more amenable to the Scottish tourist industry than the image of the despondent drinker. It can even suggest that within modern life, driven by industry and profit, materialism and wealth, there are pockets of benign resistance, seeing that to do little, have little, and make the most of the retreat from the crowds, can be very refreshing indeed. Shortly before the film ends, it looks like Wagstaff has been exporting the stuff himself, as six bottles have made it onto the mainland, and his wife bursts into uncontrollable laughter. She is now as spirited as the locals, and this needn’t rest on the drink. As the film concludes, the voiceover tells us that, in time, whisky became too expensive for the locals to buy, but that didn’t worry the sergeant and Peggy. They were not whisky drinkers, and ‘’if that isn’t a moral to the story, then what is?’’ Perhaps the final moral is that the island and Highland spirit needn’t be bottled, but that needn’t mean it is wrong if it happens to be.
 

© Tony McKibbin