Guinness is Good for You

The main joy to be had from Alec's Guinness' The Horse's Mouth is his rough gravelly delivery. He plays Gully Jimson, a great painter who never has any money, makes threatening phonecalls to patrons, and sneaks into their houses and paints murals on their walls. He can see nothing but art, and therefore has no social graces. He has a bit of Guinness' charm, but mostly seems to be a nasty, horrid man.

This is theoretically redeemed by his Art. This is always a problem with movies about painters or musicians, or books about poets. You have to show what their stuff looks or sounds like. If you say they are geniuses, but their paintings/music/poetry is not all that, well, what are you left with?

Gully Jimson's paintings (by John Bratby, actually) are modern Gauguinish, Matissey, fauvist works, with some pretty good figure work. Gully's early "masterpiece", his ex-wife in a bathtub, is rather good, I thought. The "Lazarus" he does in the 3rd act is mostly feet, with a tiger on the right. The feet are better than the tiger. The last large piece he does is really pretty bad, in my opinion.

Maybe that's the idea - he is losing it, can't produce the good stuff anymore. Maybe Guinness felt that way too, and that's why he used the slightly silly gravel voice. But Guinness seemed self-assured and charming in the role - it was only his character that seemed a little weak.