The Horse's Mouth (Criterion Collection) (1958) On DVD

Actor:           Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Renee Houston, Mike Morgan, Robert Coote                                                                                                                     
Director:      D.A. Pennebaker, Ronald Neame
Genre:          Comedy
Year:             1958
Studio:          Criterion
Length:         95
Released:    June 4, 2002
Rating:          Unrated (Video)
Format:         DVD
Misc:              NTSC, Color
Language:    English
Subtitles  :    English

DESCRIPTION:

• New widescreen digital transfer supervised by Ronald Neame
• 2001 video interview with director Ronald Neame
• D.A. Pennebaker's short documentary film Daybreak Express, which opened the original New York theatrical run of The Horse's Mouth, plus a video introduction by Pennebaker

Special Features:

Alec Guinness was in the full bloom of his stardom when he suggested, scripted, and starred in this wonderfully odd 1958 adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel. As Gulley Jimson, a gravel-voiced, antisocial painter, whose artistic drive is as single-minded (and as self-absorbed) as a terrier's, Guinness sketches one of his carefully constructed marvels. The film has a bumpily episodic structure, but when it works, it really works: Gulley inhabiting (and mostly destroying) a penthouse apartment when the upper-crusty owners go on holiday for six weeks, or marshaling 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 artworks, vivid and thick, are by John Bratby. --Robert Horton