The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Sidney Stratton gets moony-eyed when he imagines what he could do with “a modern laboratory—a proper laboratory.” When the textile mill for which he […]
Tag Archives: Alec Guinness/Grunes
Like a number of notable films of the day (for example, Helmut Käutner’s The Last Bridge, 1954, Andrzej Munk’s Eröica, 1957, Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, 1958-61), David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai casts a critical eye back on war. From a French novel by Pierre Boulle, himself a World War II P.O.W., the […]
François Truffaut once remarked that he despised what he called “film elitism,” which to my understanding can apply equally to those who make movies and those who criticize and evaluate them. There is no movie on earth that more rankly embodies film elitism than David Lean’s ponderous, self-important Lawrence of Arabia, which at the time […]
In the late forties and fifties, Alec Guinness acted brilliantly in a series of superlative British comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1952) and The Horse’s Mouth (1958). Beautifully written by T. E. B. Clarke, Charles Crichton’s Lavender Hill Mob may be the most cherished of them. “Dutch” […]
Dennis Grunes 