FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
In The Horse’s Mouth, Alec Guinness gives a typically brilliant performance as dissolute artist Gulley Jimson. Your choices, then, for what we’ll be screening on Tues 25 August, are out of three more Alec Guinness films that each showcase his versatile range. Your choices are…
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, UK, 1949)
“At once a witty comedy of manners, a grotesque serial-killer caper and an acerbic satire on the class system.” — Time Out
Dennis Price stars as Louis Manzzini, a very distant - and very poor - relative of the very wealthy Duke of D'Ascoyne (Alec Guinness). Hopelessly in love with the materialistic Sibella (Joan Greenwood) Louis decides on a short-cut to his inheritance by murdering all eight other heirs who stand ahead of him in the line of succession... Kind Hearts and Coronets is a classic Ealing comedy and Alec Guinness gives some of his best performances (plural!) by playing all eight of the vaccuos D'Ascoyne heirs-in-waiting.
Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, UK, 1959)
“For those who regard Alec Guinness as the niftiest little con man on the screen, we will guarantee Our Man in Havana to be a source of immeasurable fun..” Bosley Crowther, New York Times
Alec Guinness stars as Jim Wormold, expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana, who agrees to work as a recruitment agent for the British Secret Service in order to finance his daughter's expensive tastes. However, his new occupation invites problems in his life - especially when he meets gorgeous fellow-spy Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara) and discovers he himself is now a target... Adapted by Reed from Graham Greene's novel, Our Man in Havana is a brilliantly shadowy satire, with great support from Noel Coward as Jim’s recruiter.
Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, UK, 1960)
“A marvelous indictment of institutional machismo and performative masculinity that saw two of England's best actors...play against type and deliver two of their finest performances.” - Nathanael Hood, The Retro Set
Alec Guinness stars as Major Jock Sinclair, a boisterous battalion leader in post-WWII Scotland. When Sinclair is replaced by the strict, temperamental Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills), he sets about undermining Barrow's authority in an attempt to damage his successor's reputation among the soldiers... With support from a brilliant cast that includes Dennis Price, Susannah York and Gordon Jackson, Tunes of Glory is a moving underseen drama looking at class structures in British society and institutionalism of military life.
