THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT. Alexander Mackendrick, director. Roger MacDougall (later play as well as screenplay),[1] John Dighton, and Alexander Mackendrick, script. UK: Ealing Studios, 1951/1952 (US release).[2]

Usefully identified in the Wikipedia entry as "a 1951 British satirical science fiction comedy film made by Ealing Studios."[3] The film lacks "the look and feel" of SF film, but it elegantly uses the SF device of the novum (in Darko Suvin's respectable term),[4] or the technique of "one big lie": ordinarily a single technological breakthrough in a society very much like our own, and then spinning out the implications of the innovation for the society, or an interesting part of it.

Here the novum is a textile fiber discovered by Sidney ("Sid") Stratton the Ealing "little guy" as research chemist, played by Alec Guiness. From the Wikipedia entry:

Whilst working as a labourer at the Birnley Mills, he [Sid] accidentally becomes an unpaid researcher and invents an incredibly strong fibre which repels dirt and never wears out. From this fabric, a suit is made — which is brilliant white because it cannot absorb dye and slightly luminous because it includes radioactive elements.

Stratton is lauded as a genius until both management and the trade unions realise the consequence of his invention; once consumers have purchased enough cloth, demand will drop precipitously and put the textile industry out of business.[5]

Cf. and emphatically contrast William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, which may also be an SF work that lacks the usual SF "look and feel" and very much differently from THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT does not center on one or a few technological innovations or any "nova" as such, but involves a constellation of more everyday technology of the sort people in high-tech societies take for granted.

RDE, finishing (restoration?), 25Oct22