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Whisky for the gentlemen who like it—and for the gentlemen who don't like it, whisky
1. Patrick Leigh Fermor. I shall take his memory as the excuse to watch Powell and Pressburger's Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), although it would probably be more of a tribute if I just waited for the final volume of his travel memoirs.
2. At this point I've been meaning to write about Tunes of Glory (1960) for almost two years; I footnoted it once as "a study of two clashing models of masculinity that implode with distressingly similar ease and . . . one of the movies that got me to notice John Mills" and then never got around to the actual post. I am not sure why sleep deprivation should be a motivating factor, except that I watched the film again the other night and was still tremendously impressed with it. Alec Guinness, John Mills, Ronald Neame. If Guinness really thought it was his best work on film, he had reason; ditto Neame, who said as much in interviews and his autobiography. It probably isn't the role I like Mills best in, but he's brilliant. Just don't expect to go away cheerful.
As in the novel by James Kennaway, who adapted the script himself, the story takes place very shortly after the Second World War, at the centuries-old barracks of an unnamed, presumably fictional Highland regiment.1 Presiding over the officers' mess is Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), who's had charge of the battalion since their colonel was killed at El Alamein; now, in peacetime, he's about to be replaced by a more formally suitable C.O. This is not a change of states that sits well with the twice-decorated ex-piper. With his shock-red hair and his redder face, his brawling, cozening, brass-buttoned burr of a voice, he's larger than life and needs to be known for it, aggressively proud of his vaulting ranker's career and his rough-and-tumble leadership. He can drink his officers under the table and still make parade the next morning with never a slur to show for it—he's not going to be deposed by anyone who can be described as "a stickler for detail, but a marvelous lecturer . . . frightfully bright upstairs."
(He cannot go on at this pitch of archetype forever. He drank himself out of a relationship with Mary (Kay Walsh, chameleon), the actress who now puts him out of her dressing room with a brisk, slightly pitying fondness; his grown daughter tells him nothing anymore. But so long as he can carry it off, that indestructible swagger, he's the dangerous darling of his men and that's all that matters.)
And at first it seems that there could be nothing further from back-slapping, wily Jock Sinclair than Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills), a trim, neat, tight-backed figure in a pencil moustache and houndstooth tweeds, English-accented, gunmetal-grey, politely freezing everyone out. His is an old military family, the regiment his ancestry; he earned it through Eton, Oxford, and Sandhurst rather than "boot-boy, band-boy, and Barlinnie" and no sooner is he in command than he's changing everything about it, from drill-times to dancing lessons to the pipers' dress at band practice. He's not interested in the battalion's private traditions, he can't stand being contradicted; his high-strung insistence on the smallest of points is impervious to war stories or mild argument.2 He is the very model of a modern martinet and it's not long before he's raised as much resentment and disrespect as he meant to inspire order and civility—he's the outsider, the Sassenach, repeatedly diminutized as "Barrow-boy," "toy soldier," or "some spry wee gent" as if unable to measure up to Sinclair in even the literal sense—and he's not such a mannequin he doesn't notice, either.
(He was tortured, in the POW camp where Sinclair tweaked him for sitting out the war among "officers' privileges and amateur dramatics"—long past the breaking point and he's been carrying himself in fragments ever since. His marriage is over; he couldn't go back to teaching. He's staked everything on his father's and his grandfather's regiment, the last place he might be able to feel at home, in control, not at fault for being alive.)
It's a challenge on every level, then, from class and nationality to social graces or taste in drinks, and every interaction between the two men fuels the strain until it snaps sharply into crisis one night with a pair of very public breaches of decorum: Barrow revives the prewar tradition of the regimental cocktail party only to blow a spectacular, uncontrolled fuse when Sinclair and the officers brazenly defy his ban on rowdy dancing; when the soldiers relocate their festivities to the pub, Sinclair discovers his daughter's romance with one of the pipers and belts the young man across the face in an equally fatal loss of temper, putting himself at risk of a court-martial. As the first real test of their competing authorities, it couldn't be more disastrous. Cold-cocking your daughter's boyfriend—even if you're stupid enough to do it while you're both in uniform—is at least, almost parodically, a man's behavior: protective, possessive, paternal. Screaming with your fists white-knuckled at your sides for the dancers to stop it is worse than unmilitary; it's childish, pettish, spoilt, silly, and Barrow knows this the horrible second he comes back to himself. "The ridicule is always the finish." Presentation is against him, whereas Sinclair's up against the rules: their traditional dichotomy. It can't end anywhere nice. It doesn't.
And what makes the film stick is its refusal to take sides, to the point where it begins to feel—correctly, I think—like an exercise in unbalancing the audience. In a very slightly different film, we might root for the exuberant Jock against the tight-assed Barrow, or for the fragile Basil against the overbearing Sinclair. We know how both of those stories end, with somebody's self-image reinforced or reasserted or altered for good; we're left with some model for going on with. Here the characters shift back and forth in our estimation, sometimes by comparison, sometimes alone, ultimately both emerging as sympathetic, frustrating, and untenable. Sinclair shows an unexpected, disarming honesty when he admits to Mary, "Oh, lassie. I'm no coping at all," but a brave, risky confession of the same from Barrow only seals his contempt of the "stupid wee man"—and when Barrow gives away more than he realizes, Sinclair doesn't hesitate to use it against him.3 Agonizingly aware of his unpopularity, Barrow only reinforces his image of callous caricature each time he shuts down feedback from his men or evades his adjutant's concern; he's too desperately in need of his own authority to exercise it with any skill, too brittle to unbend before he breaks. Neither of them has come out of the war whole; neither of them is suited to peacetime, or even to the present. Barrow is holding himself together with other people's opinions and a forty-year-old dream, Jock with too much whisky and the illusion of his own resilience. And what are we left with, if the stiff upper lip and the band of brothers are equally futile? Ghostly pipers, playing their skirl of a distant, honorable, colorful past as the snow rises; time burying what it can no longer use.
I did warn you. But it's excellent. And makes me wish I had the theory to discuss the things I can feel around the edges of the story, which someone with a better grasp of postwar cinema than myself should write about. At least now maybe I can say something interesting about Hobson's Choice (1954).
1. I still kept feeling I should have been able to figure out from their tartan who they were meant to be.
2. The dissonance between Barrow and the battalion he's inherited is perfectly summarized in an exchange with Sinclair, when the colonel asks about a passing soldier: "Jim Cameron? The best heavyweight we ever had, till he got a bullet in his guts in the desert." Barrow merely makes a note to himself: "Someone should tell him to put his hat on straight."
3. I haven't yet seen The Card (1952), which looks like a lighter film all round, but otherwise I do think Guinness did his best work with Ronald Neame—there's an untidy, elusive quality to both Jock Sinclair and Gulley Jimson that matches the reality of people, not the convincingness of characters; there's more in them than the story demands and it doesn't all go together, which is as lives should be.
3. Do not forsake me, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. You need to make more music videos like that one.
Also, sleep would be nice.
2. At this point I've been meaning to write about Tunes of Glory (1960) for almost two years; I footnoted it once as "a study of two clashing models of masculinity that implode with distressingly similar ease and . . . one of the movies that got me to notice John Mills" and then never got around to the actual post. I am not sure why sleep deprivation should be a motivating factor, except that I watched the film again the other night and was still tremendously impressed with it. Alec Guinness, John Mills, Ronald Neame. If Guinness really thought it was his best work on film, he had reason; ditto Neame, who said as much in interviews and his autobiography. It probably isn't the role I like Mills best in, but he's brilliant. Just don't expect to go away cheerful.
As in the novel by James Kennaway, who adapted the script himself, the story takes place very shortly after the Second World War, at the centuries-old barracks of an unnamed, presumably fictional Highland regiment.1 Presiding over the officers' mess is Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), who's had charge of the battalion since their colonel was killed at El Alamein; now, in peacetime, he's about to be replaced by a more formally suitable C.O. This is not a change of states that sits well with the twice-decorated ex-piper. With his shock-red hair and his redder face, his brawling, cozening, brass-buttoned burr of a voice, he's larger than life and needs to be known for it, aggressively proud of his vaulting ranker's career and his rough-and-tumble leadership. He can drink his officers under the table and still make parade the next morning with never a slur to show for it—he's not going to be deposed by anyone who can be described as "a stickler for detail, but a marvelous lecturer . . . frightfully bright upstairs."
(He cannot go on at this pitch of archetype forever. He drank himself out of a relationship with Mary (Kay Walsh, chameleon), the actress who now puts him out of her dressing room with a brisk, slightly pitying fondness; his grown daughter tells him nothing anymore. But so long as he can carry it off, that indestructible swagger, he's the dangerous darling of his men and that's all that matters.)
And at first it seems that there could be nothing further from back-slapping, wily Jock Sinclair than Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills), a trim, neat, tight-backed figure in a pencil moustache and houndstooth tweeds, English-accented, gunmetal-grey, politely freezing everyone out. His is an old military family, the regiment his ancestry; he earned it through Eton, Oxford, and Sandhurst rather than "boot-boy, band-boy, and Barlinnie" and no sooner is he in command than he's changing everything about it, from drill-times to dancing lessons to the pipers' dress at band practice. He's not interested in the battalion's private traditions, he can't stand being contradicted; his high-strung insistence on the smallest of points is impervious to war stories or mild argument.2 He is the very model of a modern martinet and it's not long before he's raised as much resentment and disrespect as he meant to inspire order and civility—he's the outsider, the Sassenach, repeatedly diminutized as "Barrow-boy," "toy soldier," or "some spry wee gent" as if unable to measure up to Sinclair in even the literal sense—and he's not such a mannequin he doesn't notice, either.
(He was tortured, in the POW camp where Sinclair tweaked him for sitting out the war among "officers' privileges and amateur dramatics"—long past the breaking point and he's been carrying himself in fragments ever since. His marriage is over; he couldn't go back to teaching. He's staked everything on his father's and his grandfather's regiment, the last place he might be able to feel at home, in control, not at fault for being alive.)
It's a challenge on every level, then, from class and nationality to social graces or taste in drinks, and every interaction between the two men fuels the strain until it snaps sharply into crisis one night with a pair of very public breaches of decorum: Barrow revives the prewar tradition of the regimental cocktail party only to blow a spectacular, uncontrolled fuse when Sinclair and the officers brazenly defy his ban on rowdy dancing; when the soldiers relocate their festivities to the pub, Sinclair discovers his daughter's romance with one of the pipers and belts the young man across the face in an equally fatal loss of temper, putting himself at risk of a court-martial. As the first real test of their competing authorities, it couldn't be more disastrous. Cold-cocking your daughter's boyfriend—even if you're stupid enough to do it while you're both in uniform—is at least, almost parodically, a man's behavior: protective, possessive, paternal. Screaming with your fists white-knuckled at your sides for the dancers to stop it is worse than unmilitary; it's childish, pettish, spoilt, silly, and Barrow knows this the horrible second he comes back to himself. "The ridicule is always the finish." Presentation is against him, whereas Sinclair's up against the rules: their traditional dichotomy. It can't end anywhere nice. It doesn't.
And what makes the film stick is its refusal to take sides, to the point where it begins to feel—correctly, I think—like an exercise in unbalancing the audience. In a very slightly different film, we might root for the exuberant Jock against the tight-assed Barrow, or for the fragile Basil against the overbearing Sinclair. We know how both of those stories end, with somebody's self-image reinforced or reasserted or altered for good; we're left with some model for going on with. Here the characters shift back and forth in our estimation, sometimes by comparison, sometimes alone, ultimately both emerging as sympathetic, frustrating, and untenable. Sinclair shows an unexpected, disarming honesty when he admits to Mary, "Oh, lassie. I'm no coping at all," but a brave, risky confession of the same from Barrow only seals his contempt of the "stupid wee man"—and when Barrow gives away more than he realizes, Sinclair doesn't hesitate to use it against him.3 Agonizingly aware of his unpopularity, Barrow only reinforces his image of callous caricature each time he shuts down feedback from his men or evades his adjutant's concern; he's too desperately in need of his own authority to exercise it with any skill, too brittle to unbend before he breaks. Neither of them has come out of the war whole; neither of them is suited to peacetime, or even to the present. Barrow is holding himself together with other people's opinions and a forty-year-old dream, Jock with too much whisky and the illusion of his own resilience. And what are we left with, if the stiff upper lip and the band of brothers are equally futile? Ghostly pipers, playing their skirl of a distant, honorable, colorful past as the snow rises; time burying what it can no longer use.
I did warn you. But it's excellent. And makes me wish I had the theory to discuss the things I can feel around the edges of the story, which someone with a better grasp of postwar cinema than myself should write about. At least now maybe I can say something interesting about Hobson's Choice (1954).
1. I still kept feeling I should have been able to figure out from their tartan who they were meant to be.
2. The dissonance between Barrow and the battalion he's inherited is perfectly summarized in an exchange with Sinclair, when the colonel asks about a passing soldier: "Jim Cameron? The best heavyweight we ever had, till he got a bullet in his guts in the desert." Barrow merely makes a note to himself: "Someone should tell him to put his hat on straight."
3. I haven't yet seen The Card (1952), which looks like a lighter film all round, but otherwise I do think Guinness did his best work with Ronald Neame—there's an untidy, elusive quality to both Jock Sinclair and Gulley Jimson that matches the reality of people, not the convincingness of characters; there's more in them than the story demands and it doesn't all go together, which is as lives should be.
3. Do not forsake me, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. You need to make more music videos like that one.
Also, sleep would be nice.
no subject
Brilliant review. So sad.
Oyfn Pripetchik.
Nine
no subject
Born in 1915 was not an unreasonable age at which to exit. I'd like to think he'd write travel diaries of the underworld.
Brilliant review. So sad.
I didn't find it depressing to watch, but your mileage may vary.
no subject
That would be lovely. And we'd find the shards?
Nine
no subject
Thanks for doing the review. I wonder if Netflix Streaming has it.
*bashes you with Skillet of Sleeping, since the sleep sheep failed in his woolly mission*
no subject
It's worth looking into.
*bashes you with Skillet of Sleeping, since the sleep sheep failed in his woolly mission*
Great, now I have the Insomnia of Bruises.
no subject
You have to admit it's charmingly low-tech.
no subject
Fermor
no subject
It sounds from the obituaries as though it exists in manuscript form, although perhaps never revised for publication; I suspect it will be published anyway and I'll probably buy it.
no subject
Fascinating character. Would I'd heard of him before. I think I'll have to track down some of his writing.
2.
Well reviewed!
3.
Thanks for sharing--nicely put together, this video.
I hope you can find some sleep soon. I tried to attach some in an email to you, but it wouldn't work. Then again, I can't seem to send galette aux pommes as an attachment, either, I'm sad to say.
no subject
You'll love him, I think: he writes about place in a way that cuts through time, a zigzag association of centuries that somehow adds up to a beautiful little thumbnail of all the myths and the one obstinate, pearl-grit detail that makes a city, a town, a tree, a landscape real. He sees everywhere he travels through a scrim of stories, but he knows enough to mock himself for it, even as he falls into a reverie of the lost emperors of Constantinople or Alexander's half-sister the mermaid. He kept her tattooed on his shoulder, it sounds like. I can think of worse patrons.
Well reviewed!
I don't suppose you could tell me about the tartan if you see it?
I hope you can find some sleep soon. I tried to attach some in an email to you, but it wouldn't work. Then again, I can't seem to send galette aux pommes as an attachment, either, I'm sad to say.
Heh. Thank you. The attempt is most appreciated nonetheless.
no subject
Indeed.
I don't suppose you could tell me about the tartan if you see it?
I'm not much good for identifying tartans, but I'll let you know if I've any notion at all, an I do see it.
Heh. Thank you. The attempt is most appreciated nonetheless.
You're very welcome.
no subject
All of these movies of which I would be wholly ignorant if not for you. I am grateful.
no subject
At this point, I'm seriously tempted by the skillet idea . . .
All of these movies of which I would be wholly ignorant if not for you. I am grateful.
You're welcome. I'm glad these writeups are of use.
no subject
I am incredibly fond of the band. Both of their EPs are worth acquiring. Also, they perform live with an ominously looming weather balloon.
no subject
no subject
The ways of LJ are mysterious. Thank you!
no subject
no subject
Thank you, although I won't have been able to convey the offhand complexity of the film. It's not at all dramatically filmed, which adds to its power.