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Film’s Great Chameleon
 One
evening more than 50 years ago, in a town in
Belgium, a small boy saw a priest and grabbed his hand, greeting him
affectionately as “mon pere.”  He
walked down the street with him until they were near his home, then darted
through a hedge, bidding him, “Bonsoir, mon pere!”
The man wasn’t actually a
priest. He was Alec Guinness, dressed for the role of G.K.
Chesterton’s priest-detective, Father Brown, after a day’s
shooting. The boy’s warmth for a supposed priest he’d never
met moved Guinness and began to break down his English prejudice against
Catholicism: if the Church could inspire such trust in its priests, maybe it
wasn’t as bad as he’d been led to believe.
Not long afterward Guinness
became a Catholic and remained a devout one for the rest of his life. A year
or two later he played a cardinal under communist interrogation in Peter
Glenville’s film The Prisoner. It was one of his most
passionate performances, unlike most of the coolly brilliant comic roles he
was famed for.
A new, authorized biography of
Guinness by Piers Paul Read offers more than 600 pages of information
about the great actor, who left the stage rather early in his career to create
one of the most impressive galleries of characters in the history of movies.
Unfortunately, the reviews suggest that the book is both dull and
disillusioning. Read portrays Guinness as a tormented homosexual and an
unpleasant man, rather nasty even to his devoted wife Merula.
I must say this comes as a bit of a
shock to me, since I’ve formed a very different impression from
Guinness’s own charming memoirs, from an evening with one of his
best friends, and of course from countless hours roaring at his delightful
films.
![[Breaker quote for Film's Great Chameleon: The disguises of Alec Guinness]](2005breakers/050728.gif) Only
this week I’ve been watching
him (again) as the entire D’Ascoigne family, who are murdered in rapid
succession by a disinherited relative in Kind Hearts and
Coronets. Made in 1949, it was the first of the Ealing Studios
comedies in which he made his name. He endows each of the eight (by my
count) victims with a distinct comic personality, doing eight death scenes in
eight disguises.
That’s what he was most
noted for: disguises. He disappeared into his makeup from role to role,
seeming to have no identifiable self of his own. This seemed to allow him to
assume other personalities at will. He was so ordinary-looking that the critic
Kenneth Tynan surmised that if he were to commit a murder, “the
number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would
break all records.” Unlike most film stars, he didn’t repeat
himself; every new Guinness filmed seemed to offer us a new Guinness.
Guinness was a subtle comedian
who understood Charlie Chaplin’s principle: “When you’re
doing something funny, you don’t have to be funny doing it.” He
trusted the audience to see the humor of the situation, so he didn’t
ham it up. His style was introspective, showing a character’s inner,
almost secret self; as Tynan wrote of him, “He can seem
unobserved.” So understated was his technique that he was called
“the world’s greatest master of the invisible gesture and the
unspoken word.”
The big Shakespearean roles were
beyond Guinness, but he was perfect for Dickens’s eccentrics, notably
Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946) and Fagin in
Oliver Twist (1948), both directed by David Lean. Lean
directed him again in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for
which he won an Oscar as the tragicomic Colonel Nicholson. He was even more
memorable as an anarchic Scottish officer in Tunes of Glory
(1960). It later embarrassed him that he became more famous for
Star Wars than for the brilliant work of a lifetime.
Born illegitimate in London —
he was never quite sure who his father was — Guinness endured, or
ignored, much discouragement to become an actor, becoming one of the four
legendary British stars of his generation, all of them knighted (the others
were Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson). If he
wasn’t the greatest of these, he was certainly the most versatile and
probably the deepest. For all his dazzling technique, he can draw you into the
heart of a character like no other actor.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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