The Man in the White Suit (1951) on Netflix
Approved19511h 25mComedyDramaSci-Fi
Sidney Stratton, a research chemist, pursues a fiber that resists dirt and never wears out. At Birnley Mills he secretly uses the research equipment and makes a fabric that cannot absorb dye.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.2/1011,822 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Sidney Stratton is a gifted research chemist with one fixation: a fiber that stays clean and never wears through. His insistence on expensive laboratory work gets him thrown out of mill after mill across Northern England, so when Birnley Mills hires him as a laborer he has to reach the research equipment in secret. Working there, he succeeds, producing a synthetic fiber. A suit cut from it is white, since the material takes no dye, and faintly luminous from radioactive traces. The mill owners and the unions reach the same conclusion about what such clothing would do to the garment trade, and both want the formula suppressed. Sidney considers the discovery a benefit to humanity and refuses to part with it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Harve Bennett cited The Man in the White Suit while writing Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, recalling its lesson that "for every great advance, you pay a price", and the risk that the Genesis device would undermine the story's credibility.
- The gurgling theme that plays when Sidney Stratton's apparatus bubbles, "Guggle Glub Gurgle", was created by sampling laboratory equipment, and Jack Parnell worked the motif into his "White Suit Samba".
- Interior scenes were shot at Ealing Studios, where the studio's own offices were adapted to represent mill interiors, and Brimsdown railway station in Enfield doubled for the fictional Wellsborough station.
