Having seen Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, featuring Alec Guinness and the impeccably dappered and incisive Dennis Price with the usual suspects of English black comedy of the Fifties — Peter Sellars, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker, et al, Jane and I have become dazzled by the Guinness portrayals. In 1958 I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai on the big screen in Manhattan with my teenage chum, Stan Edelman. Ironically we had gone into the city to see Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days and were very disappointed to find that tickets were sold out; however, we decided to see another movie, Kwai, and what a powerhouse and fortunate surprise that was. I still recall the pulsating opening with the speeding locomotive and the birds frightened from their jungle roosts from all the din and the expansive use of space that Lean was famous for. Guinness was almost his peak as the dotty and demented colonel or captain who built this bridge out of a weird melange of narcissism, hubris, nationalism, and partial psychosis. It is the film that brought Guinness into the mind, I think, of the American public at large. Obi Wan-Kenobi was a light year ahead and for a different kind of audience at that.
I was 18 at the time and my English teacher had played Guinness’s version of Macbeth in class, using the AV of the time, long playing records. He informed us that Guinness was a real pro and very underrated. So between the film I had seen and the records that gave me that clipped English sound of his I began to appreciate the actor. In a film I had seen as a young boy (circa 1953), I think it was The Captain’s Paradise, or some such title, I saw Sir Alec as the bigamist observing one of two wives and speaking to a colleague, citing a quotation from Chesterton: “I am cultivating the faculty of patient expectancy.” Again, I was so taken with the rendering of the words, his charmingly precise delivery that I went home and looked up the quotation and set out to memorize it. This is the subtle impact of movies on my young mind. By the bye, the svelte and sultry Yvonne DeCarlo was in that movie, a vastly underrated actress — see her as Moses’ wife in The Ten Commandments as she steals every scene she is in with Heston.
Guinness made his movie debut as Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations directed by David Lean, a terrific version of the novel. He acted with John Mills who played Pip and years later these two would rendezvouz in Tunes of Glory (1960). In that year my mother had died and I recall seeing the movie after a short talk with Uncle Mike who said that Mills’s face just shattered in the movie. With that in my mind I saw the movie in Jamaica, Queens, in one of the last movie palaces extant, the Loew’s Valencia or perhaps the less ornate the RKO Alden. Susannah York made her debut in that film at the age of 18 or 19 and it is so hard to realize that 50 years later she and I are in the seventh decade of our lives, tempus fugit. Like music, films chronologize our lives, reminding us of our age, our time, our youth, the daily events we experienced while watching particular pictures. It is in its way a sorrowful and painful realization.Tunes of Glory reminds me of the shared youth I had with York, of my mother’s death and of my mournful loneliness at the moment, age 20 and lost to myself and the world, aching flotsam in the world.
A synopsis of Tunes of Glory can be had by Googling, but I am after something else and that is the performances of Alec Guinness and John Mills. Guinness himself has said that it was here that he gave his best acting, for indeed in the last scene he has an extended soliloquy in which he has a nervous breakdown. In this picture he is the antithesis of the Guinness we know, an actor who disappeared into his role like a chamelon — he is red-haired, brash, vulgar, coarse, stewed in booze, grotesquely insensitive, and obtuse, yet prideful, courageous and has little to his life except a past mistress, a loyal daughter and his command of a Scottish regiment. His brogue is commanding and blustery, and he modulates it for repartee, sarcasm and barbed comments, altogether terrific. John Mills, as Colonel Basil Barrow, matches him in his role as the wired, complicated and sparrow-like neurotic officer who was tortured by the Nazis during W.W. II. In one scene Mills face is a convoluted series of gestures for just a moment that reveal the innermost agony of an officer who has lost control of his command. The psychological warring and tug and pull between both officers ends in Barrow committing suicide and Major Jock Sinclair having a complete breakdown. You could say that the film is a lethal dance between two damaged men, one exterior bluff and bombastic, the other internalized and wired.
The film is a sleeper. I suggested it to Jane and the suggestion itself came from somewhere in my memory bank, half forgotten but still a resilient little gem in my mind. We will be seeing another Guinness pearl, The Horse’s Mouth in which he plays a raffish English artist; if I recall correctly he also co-wrote the screenplay and is another stellar performance. Guinness had a remarkable run throughout the Fifties and it is in Tunes of Glory that he stunned us all with a great actor’s magnificent incarnation of Major Jock Sinclair. Considering the idea of becoming an actor — see this performance and if you have the guts go ahead with it. It takes years — or a lifetime to reach the pinnacle and it is all here for you to admire, revel in, or learn from.
