Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980)

Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau in Hopscotch

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden. Screenplay: Brian Garfield, Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Garfield. Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy. Production design: William J. Creber. Film editing: Carl Kress. Music: Ian Fraser.

Hopscotch is an engaging trifle with just enough bite into the hindquarters of international espionage bureaus to make it seem more substantial. It also has the improbable teaming of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, who have a kind of chemistry that recalls Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at their best (which was mostly when George Cukor was directing them). It was their third film together, and Jackson reportedly accepted the part because she liked working with Matthau so much. With good reason: Their first film together, Melvin Frank's 1973 A Touch of Class, won her an Oscar, and their second, House Calls (Howard Zieff, 1978), was a solid box office success. Hopscotch actually doesn't give Jackson much to do: Her character, Isobel, is an old flame of Matthau's Miles Kendig, a CIA agent who decides to write a tell-all memoir to even the score with his blustering boss, Myerson (Ned Beatty), a far more committed Cold Warrior than Kendig, who sees the spy games for what they are. Isobel's role is mainly to help out occasionally when Kendig needs it, which he mostly doesn't; he's almost always ahead of the game. They have a few good scenes together, including their first encounter in the film, when they pretend not to know each other -- a scene that was actually written by Matthau. There are also some breezy moments between Kendig and his opposite number from the KGB, played with weary good humor by Herbert Lom. There's a special buoyancy to the film contributed by abundant borrowings from the music of Mozart, along with some Rossini and Puccini -- Matthau was an opera lover, so these bits of filigree are probably his contribution to the film, too.

Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, 1960)

Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, 1960)

Cast: Alec Guinness, John Mills, Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, John Fraser, Susannah York, Gordon Jackson, Duncan Macrae, Percy Herbert, Allan Cuthbertson, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Gerald Harper, Richard Leech, Peter McEnery. Screenplay: James Kennaway, based on his novel. Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson. Production design: Wilfred Shingleton. Film editing: Anne V. Coates. Music: Malcolm Arnold.

Tunes of Glory is a kind of anti-buddy movie, meaning that its chief distinction is that it gives us a chance to see two great actors paired off, though hardly as buddies. Director Ronald Neame originally thought that Alec Guinness would play Col. Barrow, the reserved, by-the-book officer who comes as a replacement for the gregarious, happily boozy Maj. Jock Sinclair at the head of a Highland Regiment sometime just after World War II. Among other things, Barrow had been interned as a POW in a Japanese camp and still suffers from post-traumatic stress. This similarity to the character Guinness had played, and won an Oscar for, in David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), may have caused Guinness to ask for the role of Sinclair instead. I happen to think it was a mistake on his part: Although Guinness is known as a chameleonic actor, able to efface his own personality in his roles, he also carries with him our memories of other performances. Too often in Tunes of Glory, I think, we're distracted by watching an actor act, rather than being caught up in the character he's creating. I was as distracted by the image of Guinness showing through the part of Sinclair as I was by the fake red hair on his head. Mills comes off rather better as Barrow, although the film doesn't give him enough scenes to develop the character's backstory -- his suicide comes as rather too abrupt, I think. Neame noted in an interview that accompanied the film on the Criterion Channel that New Yorker writer Roger Angell once suggested that Tunes of Glory should have been a play in which Guinness and Mills switched roles on alternate nights, the way Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn did in a production of Becket on Broadway in 1960-61. Or maybe the point is that the too-talky, rather static Tunes of Glory would have been a better stage play than movie.

The Horse's Mouth (Ronald Neame, 1958)

Alec Guinness in The Horse's Mouth

Gulley Jimson: Alec Guinness
Dee Coker: Kay Walsh
Sara Monday: Renee Houston
Nosey: Mike Morgan
Sir William Beeder: Robert Coote
A.W. Alabaster: Arthur Macrae
Lady Beeder: Veronica Turleigh
Abel: Michael Gough
Capt. Jones: Reginald Beckwith
Hickson: Ernest Thesiger
Lollie: Gillian Vaughan

Director: Ronald Neame
Screenplay: Alec Guinness
Based on a novel by Joyce Cary
Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson
Art direction: William C. Andrews
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Kenneth V. Jones

The artist as mad eccentric is such a tired and familiar trope that artists should complain about it. But it remains true that the only way art can find new paths for itself is by going against the grain. It just remains to be seen how much anti-establishmentarianism one can get away with. Gulley Jimson gets away with a a lot -- theft, trespassing, and malicious destruction to start with -- in The Horse's Mouth, mainly because people think he's a genius (and his art a good investment). And in spite of his grubby egocentricity, there's something lovable about him -- at least the way Alec Guinness writes and plays him. The film doesn't really have much to say about the role of the artist in society or the venality of the art business beyond the obvious points, but director Ronald Neame keeps it buoyant with the help of Guinness and company, and with the especial help of Sergei Prokofiev, whose music for the film Lieutenant Kije (Aleksandr Faintsimmer, 1934), Kenneth V. Jones borrowed to great effect. Guinness was nominated for an Oscar for his adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel, to which he added the great visual gags of Abel's block of stone crashing through the floor into the apartment below and the Beeders and Alabaster being swallowed up when they unwittingly step out onto the rug placed over the resulting hole.