The Man in the White Suit (1951)

(archive.org Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often question films for their premise (that’s part of suspension of disbelief, after all) but The Man in the White Suit seems so self-satisfied in its central satirical idea that I can’t help but push back a bit. A gentle British Science Fiction comedy meant as a star vehicle for Alec Guinness, it features a young scientist who makes a most remarkable invention: a white fabric that cannot be stained or damaged. So far so good—but as this is a fable, the plot inevitably escalates to a showdown between the inventor and a clothing establishment that will be put out of business by forever clothing. This leads to a comic climax in which the titular suit is destroyed and our protagonist left naked, with an envoi suggesting that “here we go again.”  You can certainly appreciate The Man in the White Suit at pure face value—a low-stakes comic romp featuring a young Guinness that hadn’t yet stultified into his later acting persona. You can even appreciate how it reflected the time and place from which it sprung—a WW2-devastated country still living in severe austerity, where the very idea of indestructible clothing felt wonderful and utopic. But I have, let’s say, a problem with the very idea on which the film is based. As many, many of us will unfortunately attest, from the perspective of 2022, our clothes don’t often wear out—they get outgrown by those of us still expanding in their later decades, they get replaced by clothing more appropriate to our evolving personas, or they simply get thrown away because fashion dictates it. The textile establishment depicted in this film, terrified by a lower demand for textiles, merely had to hire a PR firm to introduce fast fashion and we’d be back to where we started. It’s not much of an objection to a film meant to be taken lightly—but if you’re going to go for Science Fiction, then you also make yourself vulnerable to the nerds in the back-row nit-picking every possible detail for plausibility. Of course, we now have more than seventy years’ hindsight (and a few unfortunate periods of fashion excesses) on The Man in the White Suit, and that may be a bit too much strain to place on the film.