The Horse's Mouth

Alec Guinness has a certain Oscar distinction--he's one of a handful of performers who have been nominated in the acting and writing categories (the others are Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Ruth Gordon, Peter Fonda, Warren Beatty, Roberto Benigni, Bradley Cooper, and the only person to win both, Emma Thompson). Guinness was nominated several times for acting, but just once for screenplay, for the 1958 film The Horse's Mouth.

The Horse's Mouth also stars Guinness as an irascible old painter, Gully Jimson. When we first meet him he's being released from prison, where he served a month for harassing his former sponsor (Ernest Thesinger). He lives in a dilapidated houseboat, and his paintings are vivid and grotesque, with broad brush strokes and often featuring gnarled feet (the actual paintings were done by John Bratby, a key figure in the "Kitchen Sink" movement).

Guinness has received a letter from a millionaire asking him to sell him one of his early pictures, but all his old work was taken by his ex-wife, who then sold them to Thesinger. He arrives at the millionaire's home, where he is treated well, but the couple are leaving for Jamaica in the morning. He gets drunk and they let him sleep it off there, but he never leaves, and spends the next six weeks there, painting a huge mural on a bare wall and pretty much destroying the place.

Jimson is a fantastic character. At first we think we can't stand him, but he manages to worm his way into our hearts, much the same as he does with other people in the film, namely the barmaid (Kay Walsh) who is his sort-of girlfriend, and a young man who worships him (Mike Morgan). The film is frequently funny, with slapstick (Guinness attempts to steal a statue from Thesinger's home, and another scene has Michael Gough as a sculptor sharing the millionaire's home as a studio, with disastrous results). But there is also a pathos to Jimson. His work is valuable, but he doesn't own any of it, so he has no money. When he paints a wall of a church ready for demolition, in the hopes that it can be saved, he realizes he must destroy the work, rather than the philistine hard-hats.

Some have called The Horse's Mouth one of the best films ever made about a painter (there are other contenders--Pollock, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and two about Van Gogh--Lust For Life and At Eternity's Gate), but it is certainly the funniest.