Alec Guiness

  • The Man in the White Suit (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (archive.org Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often question films for their premise (that’s part of suspension of disbelief, after all) but The Man in the White Suit seems so self-satisfied in its central satirical idea that I can’t help but push back a bit. A gentle British Science Fiction comedy meant as a star vehicle for Alec Guinness, it features a young scientist who makes a most remarkable invention: a white fabric that cannot be stained or damaged. So far so good—but as this is a fable, the plot inevitably escalates to a showdown between the inventor and a clothing establishment that will be put out of business by forever clothing. This leads to a comic climax in which the titular suit is destroyed and our protagonist left naked, with an envoi suggesting that “here we go again.”  You can certainly appreciate The Man in the White Suit at pure face value—a low-stakes comic romp featuring a young Guinness that hadn’t yet stultified into his later acting persona. You can even appreciate how it reflected the time and place from which it sprung—a WW2-devastated country still living in severe austerity, where the very idea of indestructible clothing felt wonderful and utopic. But I have, let’s say, a problem with the very idea on which the film is based. As many, many of us will unfortunately attest, from the perspective of 2022, our clothes don’t often wear out—they get outgrown by those of us still expanding in their later decades, they get replaced by clothing more appropriate to our evolving personas, or they simply get thrown away because fashion dictates it. The textile establishment depicted in this film, terrified by a lower demand for textiles, merely had to hire a PR firm to introduce fast fashion and we’d be back to where we started. It’s not much of an objection to a film meant to be taken lightly—but if you’re going to go for Science Fiction, then you also make yourself vulnerable to the nerds in the back-row nit-picking every possible detail for plausibility. Of course, we now have more than seventy years’ hindsight (and a few unfortunate periods of fashion excesses) on The Man in the White Suit, and that may be a bit too much strain to place on the film.

  • Cromwell (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) As far as my embarrassingly short attention span is concerned, only two things save Cromwell from the weight of its hefty two hours and twenty-five minutes (back when that did not include five minutes’ worth of end credits)—a sense of characters dealing with epochal changes, and a central battle sequence that has endured much better than you’d expect. Otherwise, well, steel yourself for an extended history lesson painted with mud and maximalist production design. The cast is worth some attention, with Richard Harris and Alec Guiness staring at each other as they debate the changing nature of the British monarchy. Also worth noting is a very young Timothy Dalton in a supporting role. But there’s a limit to what actors can do with an overlong script, and Cromwell doesn’t take a long time to grate, as speeches upon speeches and digressions upon tangents all serve to dilute the film’s most interesting elements. A battle sequence does spice things up, but then it’s back to dark brown rooms for more soliloquies and period detail. I probably would have given this better marks had I been in the mood for a British history lesson—but at this moment, it feels like far too much too little added value. It’s amazing to consider that Cromwell’s original cut was (we’re told) around three hours and fifteen minutes. Wake me up once the 85-minute version hits.

  • Tunes of Glory (1960)

    Tunes of Glory (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) If you’re looking at film history as a vast tapestry of individual works in relationship with each other, a surprising number of movies are best seen when compared to others. They stand alone narratively, but their interest comes from being variations on preceding films, responses to previous work, conscious attempts to get away from something else or simply new (and not necessarily successful) combinations of elements used elsewhere. Tunes of Glory, at face value, is a somewhat dry and downbeat drama about two officers having a clash of personalities in a Highland Regiment outpost. As an almost-theatrical exploration of two different men battling for power, it’s not uninteresting even if it does play to a very specific audience and premise. It does not end well. But Tunes of Glory becomes substantially more interesting when you compare it to other films in their lead’s filmography, what with Alec Guiness playing a slob and John Mills a snob — both playing against type in a mutually-agreed upon exchange of the roles they’d initially been selected for. It’s a particularly interesting contrast when placed alongside Guiness’ previous turn as a by-the-book officer in Bridge on the River Kwai. While I can’t quite recommend Tunes of Glory as a film to watch on its own (it’s good, but it’s not that good in a universe with plenty of other unseen movies), it does become a provocative follow-up to Bridge on River Kwai, or as part of any career retrospective for Guiness or Mills. But that’s the nature of the game once you start seeing not just individual movies but pieces of film history.