MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every Friday.
The Horse’s Mouth (1958, 95 minutes)
British acting legend Alec Guinness may have reached his career high-water mark in 1958 playing Gulley Jimson, a curmudgeonly painter just released from London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison for attempted telephone extortion of one of his wealthy patrons. “I don’t mind much if you murder me,” says Hickson (Ernest Thesiger), Jimson’s intended victim, “but I cannot stand all this telephoning. It upsets the servants, and they give notice.”
The rough-hewn paintings that serve as worthy co-stars of this comic masterpiece—directed by Ronald Neame with a screenplay Guinness adapted from Joyce Cary’s novel—are loaded with ravishing color, thickly applied with a knife in broad strokes that collide with one another like wayward vehicles in rush-hour traffic. His pictures are “to be felt with the eyes,” the cranky old artist tells Dee Coker (Kay Walsh), his short-tempered, occasional girlfriend. “Half a minute of revelation,” he swoons, “is worth a million years of know-nothing.”
The only one to meet Jimson when he’s released from the nick is Nosey (Mike Morgan), a devoted follower who tries to keep his idol out of trouble. Not overjoyed, Jimson barks, “Scram! Kiss your mother goodbye and jump into the river!” Later, he confesses, “You’re a good boy, Nosey, but you’ll never be a great artist. Do something sensible like shooting yourself.” Then he steals the kid’s bike and pedals off toward the ramshackle boat he calls home.
When Jimson talks his way into the home of art-lovers Sir William and Lady Beeder (Robert Coote and Veronica Turleigh), about to embark on a six-week holiday, he’s overwhelmed by a bare wall in their posh apartment. “Just the place for The Rising Of Lazarus,” he tells the bewildered couple. “I can see Lady Beeder in the corner, nude and laughing with pleasure, and Sir William, dead-drunk and asleep, unaware of the miracle taking place.”
Once the Beeders depart, the mural unfolds in all its ragged glory, an overgrown jungle of twisted human legs and feet, financed by pawning Sir William’s valuable crockery. As Bisson (Michael Gough), a sculptor commissioned by British Railway, lowers an immense slab of marble through the skylight, the stone plummets through the floorboards into the apartment below, where he begins to carve out Mother Earth Surrounded By Her Dead. Jimson covers the gaping hole in the floor with an oriental rug.
When asked for his frank opinion of the sculpture, Jimson remarks, “It’s getting smaller and smaller every day. Chop off its extremities, and you could use it for a guided missile.” An enraged Bisson returns fire, “It’s a crackpot painting,” he says. “Too many feet!” Coker, too, clucks disapprovingly at Jimson’s canvas of a nude girl in a bath-tub. “If it was a postcard, and some poor chap tried to sell it, he’d get 14 days.”
