The Horse’s Mouth – 1958 | 97 mins | Drama, Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Alec Guinness was in the full bloom of his stardom when he suggested, scripted, and starred in this wonderfully quirky adaptation of Joyce Cary’s celebrated novel (loosely based on Dylan Thomas). The film has a bumpily episodic structure, but when the Oscar-nominated screenplay works, it really works: Gulley inhabiting a penthouse apartment when the upper-crusty owners go on holiday for six weeks, or marshalling an army of apprentices to create a masterpiece on a giant wall in a condemned building.

Departing from the novel, Guinness concocted the movie’s madcap ending, which is guaranteed to bring a smile. Adding verve is the music, adapted from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, which fits Gulley like the paint under his dirty nails. The vivid and thick artworks are provided by John Bratby. Cinematographer, Arthur Ibbetson brilliantly captures the beauty of London while sustaining the viewer’s focus on both the splendour and squalor of Gulley Jimson.

Deceptively scruffy bum Gulley Jimson (Alec Guinness) is a gravel-voiced, antisocial painter whose single-minded artistic drive causes him to race from bar to pawnshop to wealthy art patron to fulfil his artistic quest for the perfect canvas. Jimson lives an impoverished life on a Thames houseboat. Imprisoned for harassing his wealthiest patron, Hickson (Ernest Thesiger), Jimson immediately resumes the crank calls upon release from jail. Willing protégé Nosey (Mike Morgan) and cantankerous barmaid Miss Coker (Kay Walsh) are the devoted followers doomed to help Jimson on his wildest missions.

He engineers his way into a house of wealthy couple (Robert Coote and Veronica Turleigh) and convinces himself he’s got a commission to paint a mural on their wall. The couple return home to find not just a tiger on the wall but a hole in the floor and a statue chiselled downstairs by Jimson’s friend Abel (Michael Gough). With the assistance of Nosey and Coker, plus a legion of eager art students, Jimson sets to work on his largest canvas to date on the wall of a condemned church.