(2 of 3)
The Horse's Mouth (Lopert; United Artists). The stream of consciousness, as it comes boiling out of Gulley Jimson, the painter hero of the late Joyce Cary's masterpiece of monologue, is a wizard's brew—wine of genius mixed with just plain sewerage—that may be too rich for the average moviegoer's blood. Cary in his book (TIME, Feb. 6. 1950) displayed the Irish talent for tirade in formidable measure, and he revealed a teeming and generous vision of life, a Rabelaisian sense of comedy. To make a straight commercial movie out of such a vital, abundant creation was at best a poor idea, but it has to be said for Britain's Alec Guinness, who wrote the script and plays the principal part, that he has marshaled all of his considerable intelligence, taste and humor to make the best of the job.
Inevitably, the Jimsonian stream has been carefully filtered of what the censors would call impurities, and in the process much of the essential, grandly unsanitary, superbly healthy quality of Cary is eliminated too. Also absent from the film is Cary's seething energy, but Guinness supplies in its stead a stiff charge of farcical effervescence; and thanks to him. the mixture is never merely sweet. Every now and again the screen even exudes an earthy, salty, gingery, sweaty, whisky whiff of the essential Cary.
Guinness's script is reasonably faithful to Cary's story—what story there is. Gulley Jimson, a gutter genius who lives in a rotting houseboat on the Thames and has painted some of the most outrageously great pictures of his generation, is released from Wormwood Scrubbs prison, where he has just spent a month on charges of "uttering menaces"—he had threatened to cut out his patron's liver, or something of the sort. He trots over to the nearest pub, puts the bite on the barmaid (Kay Walsh), a middle-aged drab with a face, as Cary expressed it, "as blank as a sanitary brick." But she observes that Guinness is nothing but a "dirty old man," and besides he already owes her four quid nine and six.
The painter's patron offers to keep Gulley on a pension if only he will leave off the telephone calls. But the butler catches Gulley stealing a jade figurine from the patron's collection, so he is lucky to get out the kitchen door while the police are chasing round the parlor.
But along comes a man with money to burn and a wall to fill, and Guinness is off on one of the funniest half-hours he has ever played. When the millionaire takes a trip to Jamaica, Gulley without so much as a by-your-leave moves into his apartment and starts to paint a wall he has taken a shine to. Item by item he pawns the rich man's bibelots to buy the best of paints, the finest of champagne. Six weeks later, when the unwitting host and hostess walk in the front door, they stare in stupor at the devastation of their home—not to mention the wall, which looks as though it had been struck by an avalanche of garbage—and then sink quietly through a 6-ft. hole that somebody has carelessly knocked in the floor.