Guinness – Good For You

As you may know, one of the great actors of our time, perhaps of all time, has died. This review results.

It is hard even to write the words: Alec Guinness is dead.

With him died a befuddled vacuum-cleaner salesman, a comically murderous heir to a peerage (and everyone who stood between him and that coronet), an utterly and hilariously incompetent gangster, an Arab prince, a simpleminded veteran of Normandy, a Jedi master, a yogi.... Alec Guinness could and did play anyone.

Rarely was that more evident than in The Bridge On the River Kwai. It may not have been quite Guinness's best role – Lt Col Jock Sinclair, in Tunes of Glory, comes to mind – but it comes close. And it comes close to being his best film, the Ealing comedies and the other David Lean productions notwithstanding.

The Bridge On the River Kwai is of course far more than the sum of its parts, or of the performances, either. But we should look at the parts first.

It can hardly hurt, after all these years, to indulge ourselves in a minor plot spoiler by recalling that the plot revolves around the forced labor (in violation of all the laws of war) between British and Commonwealth POWs in Burma and their Japanese captors during the Second World War. But plot is not theme (the failure to grasp which distinction is the most common failing in Hollywood, and has lead to untold cinematic dreck). The themes of the film are courage, certainly, and honor, shortsightedness, pride, resistance: and all are played out in Guinness's voice, and eyes, and walk.

The film is tightly plotted and tightly written, and has a superb and memorable score by Jerry Goldsmith. The cinematography and effects remain, even now, precisely what they ought be and so rarely are: so good as to go unnoticed, serving as a true bridge, one of suspension of disbelief, from the musty theater seat to the jungles of the Irrawaddy. There are no poor performances, and if any other than Guinness's is to be singled out, it would be that of Bill Holden, who never puts a foot wrong.

And no one could have done this as the material demanded it be done, save the incomparable David Lean. Thank God, no one else tried.

But of course in the end this is wholly Sir Alec's film, God rest him. It is odd that this man – a superb writer of memoirs and indeed Catholic apologetics, and a true war hero of a minor and self-deprecating sort in the Royal Navy in that very war – should so often have played inarticulate, hidebound Army officers who crumble when The Book of Rules no longer makes sense in a changed situation; but so it is. His portrayal of a blinkered and tortured soul who at the supreme moment sees clearly at last remains harrowing, cathartic, and profoundly true.

You mustn't miss this movie. We shall all miss Alec Guinness.