All at Sea, called Barnacle Bill in England, is an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, but there’s a reason you never hear it mentioned in the same breath with Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, or The Lady Killers — except in the hopeful trailer, which claims it’s the best of them all. It’s a nice, modest, and pleasant little effort that clearly comes from the same sensibilities without being as inspired.
As in Coronets, Guinness plays multiple roles, including his hero’s ancestors, who have always been at sea literally and figuratively. Although Captain Willliam Horatio Ambrose tries to live up to their tradition, he gets so seasick that someone calls him Midshipman Queasy. He finally sinks his savings into a dilapidated amusement park located at the end of a pier, which he intends to run in a shipshape manner. Typical of the film’s literally off-kilter yet quiet eccentricity is that he bunks in the Crazy Cottage, a tilted house designed as one of the attractions.
At first, his greatest enemy on the local council is Mrs. Arabella Barrington (Irene Browne), a thorny, middle-aged frump who runs a seaside business in bathing huts and throws up no end of obstacles against Ambrose. In a smoothly handled reversal, it transpires that her business and the pier will be demolished in a scheme run by the mayor (Maurice Denham), so she allies with Ambrose when he exploits legal loopholes to create an absurd situation: his pier is declared a ship, the Arabella, and attracts publicity with its maiden “cruise”. The entire thing is being recounted in flashback after Ambrose has been decorated for bravery in the opening scene and now tells the tale while getting sozzled on rum.
Guinness attractively underplays as a nominally proper stickler with a sly streak, what they call an eye for the main chance and what he calls “a fiddler”. This lends a special magic to the moment when he dances gracefully with a young woman (Jackie Collins, sister of Joan). He’s surrounded by reliable British characters with lots of experience in such films, including Victor Maddern, Percy Herbert, Richard Wattis, Eric Pohlmann, Harold Goodwin, Allan Cuthbertson, Lionel Jeffries, George Rose, and Joan Hickson, with Donald Pleasence as a bank clerk. The activities are presented in a deadpan manner, except that John Addison’s score mickey-mouses everything with nautical winks.
Writer T.E.B. Clarke is channeling his previous triumphs with Passport to Pimlico and The Titfield Thunderbolt, which also satirize the bureaucracy of loopholes to create individualist absurdity for the benefit of a small community in rivalry with modern forces. Although director Charles Frend had worked with Guinness on the farcical A Run for Your Money, he mostly handled rugged, realistic adventures, including the straight nautical epic The Cruel Sea.
This was one of Ealing’s last films. As with several of those mentioned, the great Douglas Slocombe shot the black and white photography; there’s nothing spectacular here, although it might look different if the print were razor-sharp instead of simply satisfactory. Warner Archive has made the US edition, distributed by MGM and shot at their Borehamwood Studios (the Ealing Studios having been sold), available on demand along with a trailer.