Ealing Studios attempted to kill Alec Guinness

From: MY NAME ESCAPES ME

by Alec Guinness

Monday 6 May (1996)

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB is being shown on TV this evening but I won't be watching it. (If only I had received 1 [pound] each time one of the Ealing comedies was shown I would be a rich man. My contract didn't cover mechanical reproduction.) It was a good film, I think; well over forty years old now and mercifully it only lasted an hour and a half. Stanley Holloway and I got on exceedingly well and became good friends. He was always genial, easy-going and meticulously professional.

Ealing Studios never succeeded in killing me in spite of some quite good tries, the first of which was during the making of LAVENDER HILL. Rehearsing a brief scene in which Stanley and I were required to escape from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the director (Charles Crichton) said, 'Alec, there is a trap door over there - where it says Workmen Only - I'd like you to run to it, open it and start running down the spiral staircase. Stanley will follow.' So I did as asked. A very dizzying sight to the ground greeted me. But I completed half a spiral before I noticed that three feet in front of me the steps suddenly ceased - broken off. I sat down promptly where I was and cautiously started to shift myself back to the top, warning Stanley to get out of the way.

'What the hell are you doing?' the director yelled. 'Down! Further down!'

'Further down is eternity,' I called back.

Stanley and I regained the panoramic view of Paris pale and shaking. No one had checked up on the staircase and no one apologized; that wasn't Ealing policy.

Showering in Almeria

From: MY NAME ESCAPES ME

by Alec Guinness

Monday 19 February (1996)

This morning Matthew telephoned, having just got back from his skiing holiday in Bulgaria. He seems to have enjoyed it but found the meals fairly grim. He said his chalet was pleasant enough but he was puzzled by the showerbath, the floor of which was slanted so that water didn't go down the plug but sloshed into the bathroom. It sounds to me as if the Bulgarians have picked up a few tips from the Spanish. Tony Quayle and I, when filming LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, rented a wretched little guncrack house in Almeria for a few weeks. The only way of making the shower work was to sit on the loo, and the only chance of flushing the loo was to turn on the hot tap in the shower. The view from the front of the house was of mangy dogs rutting on a rubbish dump. I am told Almeria has greatly improved in recent years but I'm not going back.

Alec Guinness on David Lean's Memorial Service

From: MY NAME ESCAPES ME

by Alec Guinness

The last time I was at St. Paul's was for David Lean's memorial service, which was a big production number, with a military band outside on the steps playing 'Colonel Bogey', as used in the film of THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. Inside it was film star studded, at least under the dome. I don't think people at the back were totally aware of what was going on or why. Compromise is my middle name so I sat myself between the two groups. Melvyn Bragg gave an admirable address, beautifully spoken; he managed to get in a snide remark of David's about me which caused a few discreet titters. The titterers were sitting, of course, directly under the Whispering Gallery. 'Titter you not!' as Frankie Howard used to say. I had to balance my thoughts as best I could, pushing aside my bad recollections of David's extreme unpleasantness in latter years but remembering the enchanting, affable, exciting man he was in the days of making GREAT EXPECTATIONS and OLIVER TWIST. He could still switch on the charm even in his last years but I had grown mistrustful of it. We each did our best, I think, to repair our damaged friendship but it didn't really work out. I needed someone with whom I could laugh (not David's strongest point) and he depended so much, it seemed to me, on sycophants. But he was marvellously generous with his riches. The car left St. Paul's behind in the failing light. I wished David eternal happiness, as I have always done since the day he died.

Alec Guinness on HITLER THE LAST TEN DAYS

From: A POSITIVELY FINAL APPEARANCE

A Journal 1996-98

by Alec Guinness

In HITLER, THE LAST TEN DAYS, a poor film from a brilliant script, I had an hysterical, screaming speech which I plunged into almost out of control and although I believe I did it well it left me physically drained and wanting to vomit.

Alec Guinness on THE LOVED ONE

From: A POSITIVELY FINAL APPEARANCE

A Journal 1996-98

by Alec Guinness

It amazes me that there are people who think (Christopher) Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays, although there is every likelihood that Shakespeare either deliberately plagiarized an image now and then or that a line of Marlowe's, when first heard or seen, had struck so deepling into his soul that he imagined it his own. Marlowe's stagecraft is crude or non-existent when compared to Shakespeare's know-how. And is there a character in Marlowe which makes one smile, let along laugh outright? - I must cease to ride this hobby-horse and give my attention to The Simpsons, to which I'm getting addicted. Also I should bear in mind a line the hero, Dennis, says in E. Waugh's THE LOVED ONE: 'In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice.'

Before leaving for the 1958 film festival in Mexico City, to which I had been induced to go by the Foreign Office, I received a script of THE LOVED ONE with the suggestion that I should play the lead. It was a marvellous script, in which the great director Luis Bunuel had had a hand. Shortly after arriving in Mexico Bunuel sent me a note inviting himself to coffee at my hotel the following morning. He arrived at noon, full of amiability and chuckles. He kept removing his glace-mint-type spectacles to wipe tears of laughter from his eyes.

'I am a very happy man today,' he said. 'I have just been to the screening of my last movie, for the critics. It is good I think. They all congratulated me. How did you like the music, I asked. 'Mm-mm-wonderful, they said. The music was truly wonderful, they said.'

He took off his glasses again and mopped his eyes. 'I promise you there is not one note of music in the movie.'

Then we got down to discussing THE LOVED ONE. All his ideas were simple, true to the novel and yet sometimes daringly odd. He told me he didn't wish to use wax models for the cadavers in the mortuary scenes or funeral parlour but blocks of wood roughly hewn into human shape. We got on well and I was thrilled at the prospect of working with him. He explained he would be unable to start for at least another four months, which didn't worry me, although it should have done. What happened I don't know; presumably something to do with the film rights. Whatever it was, we were beaten to the post by Tony Richardson, who directed a quite different, heavy-handed script, an unwitty version as far removed from the factual, debunking spirit of Waugh as a flying saucer.

Alec Guinness on STAR WARS

From: A POSITIVELY FINAL APPEARANCE

A Journal 1996-98

by Alec Guinness

A refurbished STAR WARS is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen STAR WARS over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.

'Anything! Anything! the boy said rapturously.

'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.

'Anything, sir, anything!'

'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see STAR WARS again?'

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.