The MFAH Highlights Actor Alec Guinness

This July and August, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents Alec Guinness: An Actor for All Seasons, a retrospective featuring eight screenings highlighting one of British cinema's most versatile actors, Alec Guinness (1914-2000).

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Screenings include Ealing Studio comedies such as The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which the actor played multiple characters, along with David Lean-directed classics Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, which led to Guinness winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. Guinness is also well-known for his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. For additional information and tickets visit www.mfah.org/guinness.

Screenings:

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

(Directed by David Lean, UK, 1946, 118 min.)

Friday, July 7, at 7 p.m.

David Lean created one of the most faithful adaptations of the Charles Dickens' novel for the screen. Pip, an orphan boy with a mysterious benefactor, is plucked from his life as a blacksmith and offered a lifetime of possibilities. Alec Guinness plays Herbert Pocket, a man tasked with teaching Pip to become a gentleman. Archival print courtesy of the British Film Institute

OLIVER TWIST

(Directed by David Lean, UK, 1948, 116 min.)

Saturday, July 8, at 7 p.m.

The second of David Lean's two film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels, Oliver Twist follows a troubled orphan who runs away to London, where a pickpocket notices him and takes him to Fagin (Alec Guinness) to learn how to be a thief. Fagin's hooked nose, straggly hair, and heavy prosthetics were deliberately styled to exaggerate the character's sheer Dickensian grotesqueness and make him larger-than-life. With David Lean and the 34 year-old Guinness, he created a controversial but indelible character.

Archival print courtesy of the British Film Institute

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

(Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, UK, 1951, 85 min.)

Friday, July 14, at 7 p.m.

Guinness' most antic deadpan style shines in this satire about the creation of a fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out. Misfit chemist Sidney Stratton goes from lurking in laboratories to being the boardroom champion, until industry bosses and unions alike grasp that his wonder cloth spells doom for their livelihoods. In his bid to share his invention with the world, Stratton is chased through the cobbled streets like a public enemy, aided only by an industrialist's renegade daughter (Joan Greenwood) and a small girl who shares his innocence.

KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

(Directed by Robert Hamer, UK, 1949, 106 min.)

Saturday, July 15, at 7 p.m.

One of Guinness's most celebrated cinema turns is among his most theatrical. He dresses up as nine assorted members of the noble D'Ascoyne clan in Robert Hamer's elegant, black-hearted comedy about a vengeful outcast relative ingeniously murdering his way through his kinfolk to inherit the family title. Guinness was originally offered only four D'Ascoyne parts, recollecting "I read the screenplay on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script. I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, 'Why four parts? Why not eight or nine!?'"

Archival print courtesy of the BFI National Archive

THE LADYKILLERS

(Directed by Alexander Makendrick, UK, 1951, 91 min.)

Friday, July 21, at 7 p.m.

In one his most inspired and fondly remembered comedy roles, Guinness plays Professor Marcus, the ghoulish leader of a gang of disorderly robbers posing as an amateur string quintet to fool their landlord while they busy themselves with crime. It is said that Professor Marcus' pronounced physical characteristics are based on English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who purportedly wrote reviews to "rouse tempers, goad, and lacerate."

Archival print courtesy of the BFI National Archive

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB

(Directed by Charles Crichton, UK, 1951, 78 min.)

Saturday, July 22, at 7 p.m.

Guinness's first Oscar nomination was for his role as bank employee, Henry Holland, who hatches a plan to steal a gold bullion and smuggle it to France. The Guardian states, "He makes a beautifully warm, nuanced creation, a man who embodies the master criminal and the humble public servant in the same moment. He also has a most appealing lisp, barely discernible, save for the most opportunely comic moment-as when Henry explains to his partners in crime that there is 'a measure of wisk.'"

TUNES OF GLORY

(Directed by Ronald Neame, UK, 1960, 107 min.)

Friday, August 4, at 7 p.m.

This drama presents Guinness as the red-haired, hard-drinking Jock Sinclair, the lieutenant colonel in charge of a Highland regiment in a Scottish castle. When his new superior Basil Barrow (John Mills) arrives and upsets everyone with his rulebook severity, Sinclair unwisely sets about making Barrow's life miserable. Originally, Guinness was offered the part of Barrow, but decided that role was too similar to his character in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Director Ronald Neame said, "I knew Alec so well, that I knew if he said he could do something, he could do it."

BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

(Directed by David Lean, UK/USA, 1957, 161 min.)

Saturday, August 5, at 4 p.m.

This epic war film set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp won Guinness the Oscar for best actor for his insanely disciplined Colonel Nicholson, who misguidedly agrees to take charge of the enemy's bridge-building project. Alec Guinness said that he subconsciously based his walk from the film's "Oven" on his 11-year-old son who was recovering from polio, a disease that left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. Guinness later called it the "finest piece of work" he had ever done. The film also won seven Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture.

Funding Generous funding for this series provided by the Vaughn Foundation.

The MFAH film department is supported by Tenaris; the Vaughn Foundation; the American Turkish Association - Houston; Nina and Michael Zilkha; The ILEX Foundation; James V. Derrick; Franci Neely; Lynn S. Wyatt; L'Alliance Française de Houston; and the Turkish Cultural Foundation.

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Caroline Wiess Law Building, Brown Auditorium Theater. 1001 Bissonnet Street. mfah.org/films. General admission: $9. MFAH members, students with ID, and senior adults: $7.

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