Tunes of Glory
Ronald Neame (1960)
According to Piers Paul Read’s biography, Alec Guinness found James Kennaway’s script for Tunes of Glory the second of ‘only two I have read with pleasure as something to read’. (The first was Kind Hearts and Coronets.) This isn’t hard to understand: Kennaway’s adaptation of his own novel, published in 1956, features plenty of sharp, tangy dialogue – much of it spoken by Major Jock Sinclair, the character Guinness played. Drawing on his time in the Gordon Highlanders in the early post-war years, Kennaway describes life in a Scottish regimental barracks in 1948 and dramatises a battle of wills between its chalk-and-cheese commanding officers.
The chippy, volatile Sinclair, who rose through the ranks, won the Military Medal and DSO in World War II and has been acting head of the regiment since its previous full colonel was killed during the North African campaign. In the film’s opening sequence, in the officers’ mess, Sinclair tells his colleagues that a new commanding officer will arrive next day. The background of Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills) is very different from Sinclair’s – Eton, Oxford and, for some of the fifteen years since Barrow served as a subaltern in the highland regiment to which he’s now returning, a lecturer at Sandhurst. In the event, Barrow arrives at the barracks that same evening – in time to witness the carousal that marks the changing of the regimental order. Sinclair, who will stay on though no longer in charge, invites his successor to join the gathering in a drink and Barrow accepts. Sinclair is appalled when he specifies a soft drink because whisky ‘doesn’t agree with me’. The first conversation between them outlines the scope for conflict between the gallus Scot and the humourless, pedantic Englishman, and hints at the insecurities of both.
A few scenes take place in the town outside the barracks: an ill-fated pub outing; a theatre dressing-room, when Sinclair pays a call on an old flame, the actress Mary Titterington (Kay Walsh); his subsequent visit to Mary’s home. But most of the narrative is set in the barracks, where Ronald Neame creates the sense of a closed order, and a degree of uncomfortable suspense. For Sinclair and other officers who’ve recently seen action in WW2, some of the required routines of military service in peacetime are ludicrous. Not for Barrow, though. He’s assumed to have enjoyed preferential treatment thanks to his social and educational background, to have been given a cushy job far from the front line. It’s only when Sinclair jokes about spending a night in the cells of Barlinnie for being drunk and disorderly that he learns Barrow spent much longer as a prisoner of war in Japan.
Barrow’s strict adherence to army regulations is a crucial means of subduing traumatic memories of his time as a POW, and maintaining self-control. Sinclair et al deride, in particular, their chilly ‘Sassenach’ commander’s attempts to make the highland dancing practised by the regiment more disciplined, decorous and fit for a party to which Barrow invites local townspeople, and that turns out badly. A subplot concerns a secret romance between Sinclair’s daughter Morag (Susannah York, in her feature film debut) and Corporal Ian Fraser (John Fraser), rising star of the regiment’s pipe band. The antipathy between Barrow and Sinclair comes to a head when the latter, seeing Morag and Fraser together in a pub, weighs in with a punch that knocks the uniformed piper to the ground. Assaulting an officer of a different rank renders Sinclair liable to court martial by Brigade HQ. Although keenly aware of his increasing unpopularity (and decreasing authority) within the regiment, by-the-book Barrow can see no alternative to putting court martial proceedings in train – until, that is, a pivotal exchange with Sinclair. It’s at this point that Tunes of Glory starts to wobble.
In spite of his excellent dialogue, James Kennaway (who died very young, aged only forty, in 1968) isn’t so good at plotting the climax and resolution of his absorbing story. Sinclair persuades Barrow to change his mind by warning him that publicity around a court martial case will cause more harm to the reputation of the regiment than to any of the individuals involved. Sinclair is meant to be cannily exploiting the fact that the regiment means a great deal emotionally to Barrow, whose father and grandfather also served in it. This is just what makes it implausible that Barrow hasn’t already considered the implications of pressing ahead with the court martial.
When Barrow informs the devious Major Charlie Scott (Dennis Price) that he’s changed his mind and won’t proceed, Scott claims to be unsurprised: after all, he says coolly and crushingly, everyone in the regiment knows that Sinclair is still running the show. Barrow returns to his quarters and puts a bullet through his brain. Sinclair resumes command and, after explaining that Barrow’s death has been confirmed as suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed, announces plans for a funeral with full military honours, where the regimental pipers will play ‘all the tunes of glory’. The other officers take issue, protesting that Brigade HQ will never, in the circumstances, agree to such grandiose obsequies. As he continues to insist on these arrangements, Sinclair becomes agitated, then suffers an on-the-spot meltdown. He’s escorted out of the barracks, his officers and men saluting as he’s driven away.
After the fatal gunshot is heard in the barracks games room, Sinclair orders the timid young subaltern MacKinnon (Peter McEnery) to go upstairs to investigate. As they wait to learn the outcome, Sinclair, Scott et al gather to form a tableau – the contrived composition is inimical to what should be the group’s sudden horror that doing down ‘the Barrow boy’, as they disparagingly call him, has gone further than intended. Much better is the sequence, after a distraught MacKinnon has reported back, in which Sinclair accompanies him to Barrow’s quarters. The old soldier tells the horrified younger one to look at the corpse – it’s something he’ll need to get used to in the army – and Peter McEnery, with the help of Anne V Coates’s editing, manages this well: it’s as if MacKinnon finds himself looking straight at the body even before he means to. After sending MacKinnon on his way, Sinclair remains professional until his exit line (and the effect is theatrical): ‘It’s not the body that worries me – it’s the ghost’.
It might have been better if this laconic anticipation of the terrible remorse Sinclair will suffer had ended Tunes of Glory. Instead, we also get him telling his colleagues that Barrow’s death wasn’t suicide but murder, then the lengthy melodramatic finale. It’s hard to suppress a groan when Sinclair asks the pipe major (Douglas MacRae) which of his men will play a solo at the funeral, Corporal Piper Fraser enters (complete with black eye) and a supposedly thunderstruck Sinclair suppresses his fury. In another very stagy moment, Sinclair, as he goes bonkers, carries on talking with his back to the other officers: all but two leave the room without his realising. The exceptions, Scott and Captain Jimmy Cairns (Gordon Jackson), are the minor polar opposites beside Sinclair and Barrow’s major ones. Scott is perfidious in his relationships with both commanding officers; Cairns is unobtrusively loyal to them.
There are differing accounts of how Alec Guinness and John Mills came to play Sinclair and Barrow respectively. Read’s biography of Guinness notes that Mills, in his autobiography, wrote that ‘he and Alec first thought to toss a coin … but then agreed on what [Mills] called “off-beat” casting – Alec as the swaggering Scot, Mills as the gentlemanly Barrow’. Their performances were widely admired; I find both problematic. As the hard-drinking, cruelly insensitive man’s-man Sinclair, Guinness is essentially miscast: uncouthness doesn’t come easily to him. (Even his Fagin in David Lean’s Oliver Twist has a sui generis yet credible suavity.) It’s often absorbing to watch a great actor trying to overcome miscasting, and it is here. Guinness delivers some fine effects, especially in his walk and gestures, but you always see the effort required to produce them. His ginger moustache and toupee, presumably meant to signal Sinclair’s hot-headedness, seem to have come from a dressing-up box; they underline the artificiality of Guinness’s portrait.
The problems with John Mills’s playing of Barrow may be down to the director more than the actor. Mills is incisively good in his early scenes but the signs of Barrow’s psychological frailty soon start appearing and burst out in the set piece of the regimental party. Infuriated by his colleagues’ persistently boisterous dancing, Barrow calls proceedings to a halt. He then drives off from the barracks, accompanied by his adjutant Cairns, in an attempt to expel some of his angry tension. Barrow talks briefly to Cairns about the legacy of his time as a POW and his feelings of isolation. This exchange is well played by Mills and Gordon Jackson (excellent throughout, as usual) but would have been stronger if Barrow’s intervention at the party had been more controlled and swiftly decisive – his extreme reaction to the dancing would still have been enough to intensify the other officers’ scornful hostility towards Barrow. The way Ronald Neame stages the party debacle, and has Mills play it, Barrow seems to have suffered, just as Sinclair eventually suffers, a public nervous breakdown. After this, his quiet opening up to Cairns doesn’t mean enough.
I’m not sure things would have worked much better with the main roles reversed. Though Guinness would surely have found Barrow an easier fit, John Mills would likely have struggled to make Sinclair as dangerous as he needs to be. The supporting cast is full of people I first got to know as television actors in the 1960s – Richard Leech, Allan Cuthbertson, Gerald Harper, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Eric Woodburn (Dr Snoddie in Dr Finlay’s Casebook): they all have a nostalgic impact. As might be expected, the women’s parts aren’t up to much. As Mary, Kay Walsh (Nancy to Alec Guinness’s Fagin twelve years earlier) is entertaining when Sinclair turns up at the theatre, mechanical when she starts professing her supposedly deeper feelings for him later on. It’s frustrating that the script forgets about Morag in the closing stages but not hard to see why Susannah York went on to bigger and better things.
25 April 2020