De la bouche du cheval

Highly original and entertaining, this film explores the bizarre world of artist Gulley Jimson (Alec Guinness) whom we meet as he is released from jail. He's a scammer and a reprobate, but he's also a great artist who doesn't believe in art. Yet he is compelled to paint.

With the help of maybe girl friend (Kay Walsh) they try to track down the paintings sold on the cheap to pay off the debts of his former wife (Renee Houston). The art dealer (Ernest Thesiger) is a crook and has cheated everyone by telling them the paintings are worthless. So Gulley tries to find an art patron who will support him. He finds an older couple of patrons but after they go on holiday, he moves into their apartment and trashes it while he paints a mural.

Gulley is always looking for "a big wall" on which to paint his big paintings and finally finds the side of a building about to be demolished. His compulsion is so great, he MUST paint on this wall but has no money, so he "sells" sections of the wall to amateurs who combine to create a fabulous urban mural (to his design). This project seems to assuage his compulsions, but after the wall's destruction he's off to find a new horizon... or is he? This is one of Guinness' great performances. In a comic role with serious undertones, few actors were ever better than Guinness, and he grabs onto this quirky role with great gusto. Indeed, Guinness even wrote the script (based on a novel by Joyce Cary). At age 44, he's totally believable as the grizzled 60-ish artist. The great and underrated Kay Walsh turns in a ferociously funny turn as the friend he owes money to. Walsh's character lives in fury that she has been cheated and short-changed by life. Together, Walsh and Guinness burn up the screen with their acting talent.

Co-stars add just the right touch. Houston and Thesiger are old pros. Michael Gough plays the obsessed sculptor. Veronica Turleigh and Robert Coote are fun as the art patrons. Gillian Vaughan is a hoot as the model. May Hallatt is funny as the scrub woman.

A special word must be said for Mike Morgan who plays Nosey, the adoring and gangling young man who follows Gulley everywhere. Morgan is just terrific here with just the right blend of awkward youth and that special British eccentric comedic touch. In his late 20s, Morgan died suddenly of meningitis before the film was finished, and several of his scenes were dubbed by another actor.

This is a great film.

Ingenious, fun, silly, playful, entertaining, strange. All of these things represent not only the movie, but of Alec Guinness' portrayal of Gully Jimson, a grainy, foul mouthed old artist, trying to make it in life through his paintings. We're introduced to him from jail, and it unfolds in the sense where learning about him is also either liking or hating what life has brought him to be. Just make sure that you're not going to be an artist, or his protégé (who takes an awful lot of bullying). This is another forgotten film in time in that it's perfect casting, and perfect direction. It's an effortless viewing movie that will bring much satisfaction to viewers of any age, who aren't familiar with Alec Guinness' work besides the obvious. His passionate, sometimes surly characterization of a brilliant painter is one that should last for the ages.

Alec Guinness not only stars in what amounts to a one-man show as aging, struggling London painter Gulley Jimson, he also wrote the script. Funny he got an Oscar nomination for the writing, and not for the acting.

As Jimson, Guinness is a memorably growly, seedy type, testament to the artistic impulse of man running afoul of polite society. Even his nasty Fagin from "Oliver Twist" was affable company; Jimson tells off his young admirer Nosey (Mike Morgan) with a convincingly hoarse "Go do something sensible, like shooting yourself." It's all for laughs, of course, except when "The Horse's Mouth" gets mildly serious, mostly when Jimson holds forth on his vision of art.

"Half a minute of revelation's worth a million years of know-nothing," he tells his companion Coker (Kay Walsh).

"Who lives a million years?" is her sharp reply.

"A million people every 12 months."

"A Horse's Mouth" isn't always so smart. Walsh plays her part too shrill, Morgan his too moony, and the artist who provided Jimson's paintings, John Bratby, uses too much red. After establishing Jimson, Guinness's script doesn't do much with him. He paints some walls, gets into some trouble, and sails away, leaving others to bear witness to his "genius".

What I like most about this film, other than Guinness's fine acting and occasional scenes here and there that feature his character to good effect, is the vivid picture you get of London circa the late 1950s, double-decker buses with hoardings for Gordon's Gin and Ty-Phoo Tea on their sides. Also, director Ronald Neame finds interesting angles to frame the film from in order to give the on-screen action (rarely painting itself, but frequently static conversation shots) a bit of vitality, and often outside with lively streetscape backdrops.

This is like a David Lean movie once removed. Neame was Lean's cinematographer in his early days, Guinness was Lean's favorite actor, and Walsh was Lean's ex-wife. Even Anne V. Coates, later the Oscar-winning editor of "Lawrence Of Arabia", snipped this as well.

She deserved her Oscar; not so Guinness his nomination here. As a comedy, "The Horse's Mouth" is a bit of a miss. A scene of Jimson ruining a rich couple's penthouse apartment is painfully unfunny, especially when a sculptor friend of Jimson (Michael Gough) arrives out of nowhere to add to the mess. Most of the other business in the movie, like a struggle between Jimson and his ex-wife for a portrait of her he needs for painting money, feels like chopped-down scenes from Cary's novel mined for easy laughs, at some expense to story.

I didn't care much about Jimson by story's end, but I did enjoy his company, or rather that of Guinness playing Jimson, staring at a charwoman and fixated by her feet, "...old women's feet...thin, flat, long...clinging to the ground like reptiles". Like much else in regard to the movie, I'm at a loss to what it means, but I value the experience. That counts for something with art.

One of the best movies about art ever made, `The Horse's Mouth' examines the relationships between vision and creation, between art and commerce, and – most importantly – between art and criticism; and makes us laugh at the same time. Alec Guinness is inspired (when was he ever not inspired, come to think of it) as Gully Jimson, a painter of unlimited ideas who has met with only limited success in the art marketplace – partly because he is so contemptuous of that marketplace. His search for the perfect wall on which to paint, and the subject matter he ultimately winds up painting on one of the walls found in his search, is priceless. The Joyce Cary novel, and its companions in the Jimson trilogy (`Herself Surprised' and `To Be a Pilgrim') are well worth reading, but this movie is a very British, very engaging classic. In many ways, it's the movie that `Pollack' (good though it was) should have been.

Confession time, I first saw 'The Horse's Mouth' around ten or twelve years ago, one afternoon on British television and hated it. Alec's "Gulley Jimson" seemed to me to be very un-likable and I found myself unable to get the point of the film. However, re-watching this on DVD, I found it to be far, far better than I remembered and something of a revelation.

I found myself identifying with "Gulley" this time around and appreciating Alec's subtle performance (to the extent that I was genuinely sad to see the film end). Guinness is backed by two astonishingly fine performances by Walsh and Houston (it's Rene's finest performance, for someone with a tendency to play 'broad' here she is remarkably subtle).

All in all, a wonderful if sadly under-rated film and one equal to Alec's best Ealing work.