However, his directing career declined throughout the following decade, and he was fired or replaced from several projects, owing in part to his perfectionist approach to filmmaking.

[3] Mackendrick retired from directing in the late 1960s after completing A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) and Don't Make Waves (1967), becoming the founding Dean (and later a Professor) of the CalArts School of Film/Video.

(US: Tight Little Island, 1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mandy (1952), The Maggie (US: High and Dry, 1954) and The Ladykillers (1955), the first two and the last being among the best known of Ealing's films.

The reason why I have discovered myself so much happier teaching is that when I arrived here after the collapse of the world I had known as Ealing, I found that in order to make movies in Hollywood, you have to be a great deal-maker ...

This was a critically successful film about a press agent (Tony Curtis) who is wrapped up in a powerful newspaper columnist's (Burt Lancaster) plot to end the relationship between his younger sister and a jazz musician.

He also made a handful of films throughout the Sixties including Sammy Going South (1963) for former Ealing producer Michael Balcon now with Bryanston Pictures, A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), and Don't Make Waves (1967).

[11] After Sweet Smell of Success, Mackendrick returned to England to make the second HHL film, The Devil's Disciple (1959), but he was fired a month into production owing to lingering tension from their first project together.

Mackendrick was replaced on The Guns of Navarone for allegedly being too much of a perfectionist for spending more time than planned on scouting Mediterranean locations and insisting on elements of ancient Greek literature in the screenplay.

For several years, Mackendrick was set to direct a biopic of Mary, Queen of Scots, starring Mia Farrow and Oliver Reed.

[4] Some of Mackendrick's most notable students include David Kirkpatrick, Terence Davies, F. X. Feeney, James Mangold, Stephen Mills, Thom Mount, Sean Daniel, Bruce Berman, Gregory Orr, Douglas Rushkoff, Lee Sheldon and Bob Rogers amongst others.

"[16] Geoffrey O'Brien described Mackendrick as a "singularly elusive sort of auteur,"[19] whose films' "controlled surfaces and exquisitely lucid storylines a potential for chaos and violence swirls almost palpably.

His reasonable and civilized art is profoundly in tune with instinctive forces that can manifest themselves as ecstatic celebration but also as tribal warfare or relentless perseverance in a private mission.

But if the overall sense of Mackendrick's career is of great potential unfulfilled, his oeuvre, though small, is distinctive and always rewarding, the work of a visually acute filmmaker who thought in images and movement whilst always remaining in command of cinematic storytelling; a director whose films offer a complex and ambiguous mix of pessimism, callousness, mordant humour and startling empathy with the innocent and brutal world of the child.

This belated appreciation no doubt owes a debt to Mackendrick’s classicism, his dedication to well-crafted, character-driven narratives that avoid baroque visual excess in favor of a subtler authorial stamp, the complex emotional and intergenerational dynamics that unite Mackendrick's films, be they funny, disturbing, moving or a heady combination of all three.