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| Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Renee Houston,
Mike Morgan, Ernest Thesiger |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Nosey
(Mike Morgan): The world needs artists!
Gulley Jimson (Alec Guinness): Lunatics, too. But don’t
go putting yourself into an asylum any sooner than you have to!
Artist
Gulley Jimson strives for nothing but perfection of his vision, mostly
unsuccessfully and with complete disregard for the lives of others.
 His
face is permanently engraved on the world's collective memory as the
aging Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. But given
a choice, I feel certain that Alec Guinness would have preferred to
be remembered for his portrayal of Gulley Jimson, the down-and-out painter
so obsessive about his work that he never could get an even break. But
then again, it does seem fitting that Guinness's most personal work
should ultimately survive as a small, unknown gem, to be discovered
by new audiences eager to see more of Guinness's 'early' work.
The film's relative obscurity is somehow well-suited to the film's theme
of an artist's obsessive vision and its dry, elegiac tone. Guinness's
droll screenplay adapts Joyce Carey's novel as a series of occurrences
rather than a plot-driven narrative. The film's momentum relies solely
on Guinness's performance as the gravel-voiced Jimson, whose gruff manner
and lack of manners conceal a brilliant artist struggling to bring his
vision to life. Director Ronald Neame does little more than keep things
together, only barely steering clear of occasional descents into broad
farce. And though it may lack the tight narrative structure of the Ealing
comedies that made Guinness a well-known actor, the glimpses of vulnerability
under Jimson's hard shell give The Horse's Mouth an undercurrent
of pathos that can be truly moving. |
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Only
available on DVD from the Criterion Collection as a Region 1 release.
The
anamorphic widescreen image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx.
1.66:1. The image presented here looks as bright and colorful as it
ever will, having undergone some solid restoration efforts that have
successfully freed it of scratches, dirt and various other debris. The
early Technicolor cinematography looks a little pale, but that is typical
of the process used at this time in the 1950s, and the transfer on this
DVD manages to impress throughout.
The monaural sound mix is also more than satisfactory, anchored in the
center Dolby Digital channel. The limited dynamics are most evident
in the musical score, which sounds tinny and sometimes muffled, but
dialogues come across sounding natural and very clear, as do most sound
effects.
This
director-approved DVD release is graced by a nicely edited 19-minute
interview with director Ronald Neame, who talks at length about
how the project was started, and what the nature of his involvement
was, as well as that of actor/screenwriter Alec Guinness. Generously
illustrated with film clips, stills and other images, this interview
covers all the bases on this film's production history. The theatrical
trailer (which doesn't give a very reliable impression at all of
the film) is really the only other film-related extra on the disc. But
three excellent essays on various aspects of the film are collected
in the beautifully designed booklet that accompanies it. Criterion Collection
releases have of late been structurally enhanced more frequently with
great information in nicely designed booklets that manage to demonstrate
yet again how much easier it is to read long text from the page than
it would have been from the screen.
Separate mention must go to the inclusion of D.A. Pennebaker's first
commercially released short film 'Daybreak Express', a gorgeously
impressionist collage of images picturing New York City and its subway
trains at daybreak. This 6-minute film opened the bill when The Horse's
Mouth first played in New York, so it's provided here for completion's
sake more than anything else. Showing how they always manage to go the
extra yard when it comes to DVD extras, the DVD producers even taped
a 2.5-minute interview with Pennebaker in which he talks about how his
first film sale came about. All of this of course doesn't really have
very much to do with the main feature on the disc, but it's a great
inclusion that illustrates the quality of work unique to the Criterion
Collection. The
drawing used as art for the poster forms the background image for the
static main menu screen, which is accompanied by the main Prokofiev theme
from the film. Navigation throughout is as carefully and pleasantly designed
as one has come to expect from Criterion Collection releases.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: July
1, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on The
Horse's Mouth.
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to return to the front page.
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