The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection
Film Info
1960
106 minutes
Color
1.66:1
Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
Anamorphic
English
Release Info
Catalog Number:
TUN020
ISBN:
0-78002-785-X
UPC:
0-37429-18592-6
SRP: $29.95
Tunes of Glory
- Robert Murphy
Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory, which was widely admired when it was first released, has subsequently kept a low profile. This says more about critical attitudes and British film culture than it does about the quality of the film. Made in color when most British films were still made in black and white (one reviewer complained of being distracted by Alec Guinness’ “marmalade” moustache); concerned with the affairs of an exclusive Scottish military caste at a time when British cinema was beginning to investigate the unexplored hinterland of working-class life; it seemed to fit into no tradition, no genre, and thus was unjustly neglected. However, it is this film’s uniqueness that makes it all the more fascinating.

Like contemporary realist films such as Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), Tunes of Glory is based closely on a popular first novel. James Kennaway—Scottish, upper-middle class, an officer in the Cameron Highlanders and the Gordon Highlanders before going to Trinity College, Oxford—had a very different background to working-class writers like John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. However, in Tunes of Glory, the concise, powerful novel he published in 1956, Kennaway is equally obsessed with class, and his protagonist, Jock Sinclair (middle-aged though he might be) is no less a working-class hero than the likes of Joe Lampton, Arthur Seaton, and the other “angry young men.”

Nevertheless, Kennaway’s novel was not an obvious choice for a commercial film (indeed it was rejected by Kenneth Tynan in his capacity as script advisor at Ealing Studios because he thought there was too much “army worship”). British audiences were used to the rituals of life in the army, navy, and RAF from the innumerable Second World War films of the fifties, but there they were tied in with exciting action. A film about two cantankerous, middle-aged colonels disputing control of a Highland Battalion in a snowy Scottish town might have been considered to have less popular appeal. Ironically, Michael Powell’s almost contemporaneous The Queen’s Guards (1961) sank without a trace at the box office, despite the splendid pageantry intended to appeal to international audiences. Ronald Neame sought a different solution, making things work by recruiting the two best British actors of their generation to play the two colonels: Alec Guinness—cast against type as the up-from-the-ranks Sinclair—and John Mills, whose best-known uniform role was Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake in David Lean and Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942).

With two actors of such stature starring in the film there was a need to even out their parts. In Kennaway’s novel, Jock Sinclair is presented as bullying, wily, selfish, and coarse; but he is undoubtedly the hero. Barrow, “the spry wee gent” who supersedes him, is treated with considerable sensitivity and attracts our sympathy, but he is never allowed to emerge from Jock’s shadow. Kennaway’s script for the film simplifies but also intensifies the action of the novel. By omitting certain sequences—most especially that where Jock plays the pipes, and that where young MacKinnon discovers him on a fog-shrouded bridge dressed in full regalia—Jock becomes more of an egocentric monster and less a fallible but likeable human being. Kennaway also introduces a new plot twist that raises the stakes between the two men. In the novel, both men remain locked into their uncompromising positions to the end. In the film, they both appear to compromise. But it is the unreality of that compromise that leads to tragedy, and what is lost in subtlety is made up for in emotional intensity. A fascinating study of conflict and survival centered upon a war hero ill-adjusted to the needs of peacetime society and resentful of an unjust class system becomes the tragedy of two men whose fierce pride and ambition force their conflict inexorably towards madness and death.
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