GUINNESS-IN-EARNEST
Dworkin, Martin S.
State of the Cinema Guinness-in-Earnest By Martin S. Dworkin ALEC GUINNESS has appeared in person in the United States as the omniscient psychoanalyst of T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. He has...
...Here the basis of modern industrial society is reduced to delightful absurdity, as a laboratory handy-man, who is a self-taught genius, discovers a fabric that will not soil or wear out —nor ever need replacement by new production...
...II The Promoter, currently showing, is in the line of the others, presenting the Guinness merchandise in another form, a little faded from use, but charming finery nonetheless...
...The satire of The Man in the White Suit is even sharper...
...In Kind Hearts and Coronets, he appeared in many roles, as various relatives, male and female, of a young man determined to gain a dukedom by eliminating the entire lineage ahead of him...
...In this film, the "gimmick" has begun to appear clearly: the eccentric switch-on-the-ordinary that makes Guinness-in-earnest appear so ludicrous...
...Above all...
...If his wits occasionally direct him to dishonesties like altering his school grades or forging his own invitation to a reception by the local lioness, it is society's sincerity that is really questioned, rather than his...
...But the full flowering is in the last three films...
...The real popular Guinness is none of these, but a wry eccentric whose character has been built up in a series of comedies, and who has emerged as one of Britain's principal exports in the battle to bridge the dollar gap...
...His method of rising is by use of his wits, since he has little else...
...The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in The White Suit, and The Promoter...
...The stuff finally decomposes, but the handy-man appears at the end to have found where he made his miscalculation, and we are left with the mischievous prospect that some nonentity who carries the theories of science to their utter ends may overthrow the preposterous sanity of all our industrial majesty...
...The first glimpse of this Guinness was in A Run for Your Money, in which he played a supporting role as an obtuse garden editor, suddenly saddled by his newspaper with two Welsh singing champions who have come to London to see a football match, and to receive their prize money...
...It enhanced the comedy of the successive murders to observe the inevitable resemblances—like a running gag throughout the film...
...That he is an actor of great range and versatility, even having given a spectacularly controversial Hamlet in London last season, is irrelevant...
...In Last Holiday, the outlines of the Guinness character began to be filled in...
...If the satire of society is not so deep, it may be because the film more apparently, if indirectly, mocks the contemporary penury of England, reaching back into the primeval days of the early horseless carriages to show a Promoter in action, managing to get on in the world by ingenuous ingenuity...
...The film is based upon Arnold Bennett's The Card, and relates the rise of a washerwoman's son to be Mayor of one of the Five Towns, famous for grime and pottery...
...It is discovered that the doctors have erred, but the plot gets its due as Guinness is killed in an automobile accident, trying to keep from running over an old dog about to die anyway...
...The fact is that he has demonstrated the power to make dollars in a certain kind of role, and it has become almost a patriotic duty for Englishmen to accumulate dollars —even if this means being delightful when it might be profounder art to be morose...
...For, you see, he is only a young man trying to get ahead, and using the ways of getting ahead that bring success...
...Guinness the Promoter makes us laugh, and never trades on cruelty— a moral for the Promoters who are always with us, and within us...
...He has also been seen as so Dickensian a Fagin in the film, Oliver Twist, as to excite the anger of groups which saw no reason, artistic or historical, for reminding the world that Dickens had been taken in by an anti-Semitic stereotype...
...In the first, he is a rock-reliable clerk of the Bank of England, who develops a scheme to rob a shipment of bullion, smuggling the gold to France in the guise of leaden models of the Eiffel Tower...
...Here he was an obscure failure who begins to seize Fortune by the tail successfully only when he believes he has nothing to lose, since he is scheduled to die of an incurable disease...
...Thereby, the vulnerable nose of respectability is tweaked, as two of England's most unimpeachable institutions, the Bank of England and the honest dark, are taken off with gusto...
...Although this multiple role was surely a tour de force of the first order, it should be noted that in his many parts Guinness was always not only recognizable, but designedly so...
Vol. 17 • June 1953 • No. 6
