Tunes of Glory (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Colin Lesslie; directed by Ronald Neame; screenplay by James Kennaway, based on his novel; cinematography by Arthur Ibbetson; production design by Wilfred Shingleton; edited by Anne V. Coates; music by Malcolm Arnold; starring Alec Guinness, John Mills, Susannah York, Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, John Fraser, Gordon Jackson, Duncan Macrae, Percy Herbert, Allan Cuthbertson, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Richard Leech, Gerald Harper, and Peter McEnery. Blu-ray and DVD, color, 106 min., 1960. A Criterion Collection release.

If only all facets of military life were as benign as military bands! Every branch of the American armed forces (except the Space Force, so far) are equipped with multiple bands, as are the defense forces of various states. Apart from eating up taxpayer dollars, they appear to do little harm, and parading with a French horn in my high school marching band gave me a love for John Philip Sousa that’s with me still.

But no single instrument calls the American military to mind as strongly as bagpipes evoke the British forces, and especially the Scottish ones, whose traditions are deeply invested not just in the sound of the pipes but also the dancing and socializing they inspire. So integral are these to the Highland regiment in Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory, now available in a new Criterion Collection edition, that their near-ubiquitous presence is never explained or justified, simply taken for granted from the get-go. And when a new commander orders a seasoned officer to brush up his dancing at unneeded practice sessions, tensions already brewing are brought to a boiling point.

Tunes of Glory was adapted for the screen by Scottish author James Kennaway from his own 1956 novel. Kennaway was a member of two Highland regiments before becoming a writer, and as Robert Murphy points out in a Criterion leaflet essay, he came from a relatively posh background, quite unlike the working-class roots of other writers (Alan Sillitoe, John Braine) whose work engendered major British films of the period. Accordingly, the key characters in Tunes of Glory are not enlisted men at war but established officers in peacetime. Set in Scotland not long after World War II, the story centers on rough-and-ready Major Jock Sinclair, the interim leader of a battalion near a quiet town, and the relatively refined Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow, who arrives to take permanent command of the post, which earlier generations of his family also served.

Friction between these contrasting personalities—a whiskey-loving carouser, an abstemious stickler—breaks out the moment they lay eyes on each other. One thing they share is commitment to the music of the pipes and the rhythm of the dance, but here too their differences prove intractable. Sinclair’s rowdy, high-kicking style clashes with Barrow’s preference for controlled enjoyment and decorous appearances before the townsfolk. Nor are Sinclair’s freewheeling activities limited to regular boozing and wild dancing. He’s been having an on-and-off affair with a local actress, and his efforts to hide it haven’t prevented his daughter, Morag, from figuring out what’s what.

Morag is no wallflower herself, and when Sinclair catches her cozying up with her piper boyfriend in a pub, he flies into a rage and gives the young corporal a nasty punch. This might not be a big deal if it were a private fight, but since it transpired before witnesses in public, Barrow feels compelled to take disciplinary action. A court martial for Sinclair will probably ensue, and Barrow also suffers, caught between his duty to punish a miscreant and the unpopularity of this move among the ranks. The story culminates in tragedy for one, overwhelming guilt for the other.

Tunes of Glory premiered in 1960, when the rising British New Wave was making cinematic news. Unlike such fresh talents as Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, the somewhat older Neame already had a long track record as a cinematographer and a sizable one as a director. He shared the younger crowd’s fascination with Britain’s inescapable class system, though, and clearly saw Tunes of Glory as a means of exploring this through the eyes of characters who, like him, had been around the sociocultural block more often than the Angry Young Men and their movie counterparts. Equally important, he saw the project—which various studios had turned down in favor of trendier materials—as a vehicle for the first-rate acting that he saw as the most vital ingredient of any good film.

In the acting department he fared extremely well, landing Alec Guinness and John Mills to play Sinclair and Barrow, respectively. This casting was less intuitively obvious than it may seem, as Neame observes in a couple of interviews on the Criterion disc. Guinness and Mills had worked together once before—in David Lean’s 1946 Great Expectations, which Neame had produced—and the director’s first instinct for Tunes of Glory was to have Guinness as “the educated one” and Mills as “the red-headed boozer.” This comported with the private personalities of the actors: Guinness tended to be inward and reclusive, Mills to be outgoing and gregarious. It also suited Mills’s knack for “lower-deck” characters and his flair for military roles, ten of which he’d played in prior films.

On the other hand, Guinness was fresh from Neame’s excellent 1958 comedy The Horse’s Mouth, reconfirming his own expertise with the lower deck, and his great enthusiasm for playing Sinclair evidently decided the issue. While this was certainly a good outcome, I suspect that Guinness would have given more vivid inner life to stuffy, uptight Barrow than Mills manages to bring, twitching eyelid and unstiff upper lip notwithstanding. Then again, Mills won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival, so all worked out for the best—although as documentary filmmaker Nigel Algar notes in a Criterion extra, the ideal solution was proposed by a New Yorker reviewer who imagined a stage production with Guinness and Mills alternating the lead roles nightly.

Even with top-tier talent, Neame left nothing to chance, rehearsing for a full three weeks and sometimes enhancing the performances cinematically, as when a pivotal moment—suggesting dangerous wobbles in Sinclair’s uneasy mind—is underscored with an enigmatic low-key hum. He also assembled a fine supporting cast. Susannah York, a Midlands repertory actress who saw the movies as a second-rate venue until this production convinced her otherwise, plays Morag with confidence and skill. Other standouts are Dennis Price as the dour and ambiguous second in command; John Fraser as the corporal who receives the fateful punch; Duncan Macrae as a pipe major always busy on the sidelines; Kay Walsh as Mary Titterington, the faded actress; and Gordon Jackson, forever identified in my mind as the sonorous butler in the original Upstairs Downstairs, as another notable among the officers.

Hoping to shoot on location, Neame approached a Scottish commander who was receptive until the sight of scantily dressed Mary Titterington on the novel’s cover persuaded him that hosting the film wouldn’t create the proper military impression; he did grant approval to photograph the exterior of the regimental castle, but only if a matte shot would make it unrecognizable in the finished film. In the end, almost everything was shot on Shepperton soundstages, and London soldiers—skilled at bagpipes but requiring instruction in the fine art of wearing kilts—played the Scottish troops. To shore up authenticity, Neame had Kennaway on the set for consultation throughout principal photography. The illustrious Malcolm Arnold composed the music and Arthur Ibbetson did the crisp Technicolor cinematography, unusual at a time when black and white was so much the British norm that a critic complained about Guinness’s distracting “marmalade” mustache.

To avoid spoilers, I’ll be a bit cagey about the conclusion of the story, but I think my point will come across. As the conflict between Sinclair and Barrow escalates, Kennaway’s novel keeps them at an unbridgeable emotional distance. The movie version allows them a temporary but illusory compromise that Murphy approves of in his essay, arguing that it shifts the emphasis from Barrow’s individual resentment and maladjustment to the double-sided tragedy of two men undone by inflexible pride and poorly managed ambition. But for me, the conclusion doesn’t quite work on either page or screen. Both iterations end with Sinclair planning a grotesquely elaborate ceremony that he crazily hopes will exorcise the crushing remorse his actions have brought upon him. In the book, his scheme seems thinly motivated and arbitrary, and the movie makes matters worse with a clichéd flourish, having Sinclair’s demoralized colleagues shuffle haplessly away while he drones on about his overblown idea. In a film that usually strikes a good balance between behavioral overtones and psychological undertones, this culminating scene tilts disappointingly toward staginess.

That’s my only real quibble about a movie that did poorly at the box office in 1960 but holds up sturdily today, thanks to Neame’s understated style—his moving camera never intrudes, his focus on acting never wavers—and its many fine performances. Criterion’s edition offers a great-looking digital transfer and a small but engaging extras package: amiable interviews with Neame, a chatty BBC interview with Guinness from 1973, a low-energy talk with the aging Mills from 2002, and the trailer, which pitches Tunes of Glory as a successor to David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. That pitch is definitely a stretch, but as modest as it seems compared with Lean’s 1957 epic, Tunes of Glory deserves far more attention than the past sixty years have accorded it. Criterion’s edition should help to set things right.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video and author or editor of fifteen books on film.

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