In this brilliant satire on big business and consumer society, Alec Guinness plays a young inventor who incurs the wrath of proponents of planned obsolescence-both management and workers- when he attempts to introduce an indestructible fabric onto the market. "As a comedian, Alec Guinness has always been best in the role of an ordinary man with an obsession; who, in the modern world, could be so ordinary and so obsessed as a scientist?°.Guinness is the quirky idealist, (t)he impersonal, bland monomaniac scientist°beautifully matched with purring, seductive Joan Greenwood-all guile and scorn and perversity, and without any real aim or purpose. Alexander Mackendrick directed this deft social triangle (capital-science-labor) with a good eye for the tragicomic scientific mentality; the inventor is defeated, not by economic storms, but by a technical flaw." (Berkeley Cinema Guild, 1960s)