Alexander Mackendrick's The Maggie (1954)

Alexander Mackendrick's comedies lead up to this kind of extreme, savage ending with triumph and humiliation and an uncertainty about what they "mean."
--Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (The Overlook Press, 1977)

Mackendrick was an American who directed several gentle comedies at Ealing in the 50's (The Man in the White Suit was another, in 1952) that were not so gentle, often pitting Americans against the old-fashioned customs of Scotland (as in The Maggie) or England and where nobody comes off unscathed.  In The Maggie (called High and Dry in America) an American tries to ship his furniture to his estate in Scotland and an Englishman screws up the shipping, assigning it to an old broken down Scottish "puffer, " barely able to make it on The Clyde.  The American has his way of doing things and the Scots have theirs and the Scottish skipper outwits every attempt of the American to intimidate him, with the furniture and the appliances ending up at the bottom of the river and the captain paid off and The Maggie renamed The Calvin B. Marshall in the American's honor.

Like most good comedies The Maggie is a serious film, about the clash between the old ways, represented by Captain Mactaggart (played by Alex Mackenzie) and the new ways represented by Marshall (Paul Douglas).  In the middle is a boy (played by Tommy Kearins) who tries --mostly unsuccessfully-- to understand both sides.  The film was made on Scottish locations, in beautiful black-and-white.

Mackendrick came back to America after this film and made the corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and in 1959 Ealing was dissolved, a victim of some of the same forces portrayed in The Maggie.  Although Ealing is known for its comedies (particularly those with Alec Guinness) they did make some superb dramas, especially in their early years (the studio years were 1939-59).  My own favorite is It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer in 1947.  I highly recommend Charles Barr's intelligent and thorough book about Ealing, England and the British film industry.