| "It’s no’ the body worries me; it’s the ghost," says Sir Alec Guinness in a thick Scottish brogue near the end of Tunes of Glory (U.K., 1960), the Ronald Neame drama that chronicles the changing of command in a Scottish military regiment after the Second World War.
Guinness, cast against type, plays the outgoing CO, Major Jock Sinclair, a boozy, barrel-chested, ruddy-faced, up-from-his-bootstraps man of the people. Guinness? Barrel-chested? Yes, as if we needed further proof that the inimitable British thespian thoroughly inhabited every role he ever played, the actor completely transforms himself into a jocular army man, loved as much by his troops as he is respected by his fellow officers.
Guinness is matched by the equally inimitable John Mills as incoming Lt. Col. Basil Barrow. As prim and uptight as his alliterative name would suggest, Barrow is a beady-eyed, ball-busting, by-the-book, petty bureaucrat in pressed uniform – a prig of an officer who has memorized the rules and expects everybody to play by them.
Needless to say, as Barrow attempts to turn the Argyles into his vision of a respectable regiment following years of command under the easy-going Sinclair, the plot of Tunes of Glory is bunkered in the tension between the rival commanders’ conflicting personalities. By now, this is an old and familiar story, but elegantly told, with only the slimmest deviations from its central focus.
Certainly, Sinclair has a comely daughter, Morag (Susannah York), and he doesn’t like it when he finds her returning friendly fire from one of the corporals (John Fraser) in the regiment’s pipe band. But even this episode serves to fuel his dispute with Barrow, who grows increasingly apoplectic as he tries to keep Sinclair, and the rest of the troops, in line. As Barrow’s stress begins to mount, Mills somehow makes his forehead veins pop in just the right places, and the whole movie turns, literally, in the twitch of an eye.
Unfortunately, this twitch leads to an unusually violent and strangely supernatural ending, not in itself a bad thing, but somewhat out of place in Tunes of Glory. For a film that is built upon the subtle performances of two veteran actors, the dramatic conclusion invoking Shakespeare’s famous Scottish play seems slightly over-the-top. In the interview with director Neame on this Criterion Collection DVD, it’s interesting to hear the former cinematographer say he prefers films in which the actors, and not the director, play the starring roles. The evidence is there in Tunes of Glory, but only up until the final reel.
Still, with terrific lead performances, as well as memorable turns from a list of esteemed British character actors (Dennis Price, Gordon Jackson, Paul Whitsun-Jones) in the supporting roles, the film nails its milieu. The subtexts in Tunes of Glory include a scathing critique of the British class system and an examination of the military’s role in times of peace. As Mills says in his own interview on the disc, "It’s not much of an advertisement (for the military life), is it?" |
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