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Keeping Mum
Film Review  October 13, 2006
Description: Maggie Smith, Rowan Atkinson, Kristen Scott Thomas, and Patrick Swayze come together for this dark British comedy.

"...The latter was remade recently by Yanks Joe and Ethan Coen, who managed rather successfully to import Ealing's predilection toward the black, lacy unmentionables that lurk, throbbing and barely contained, beneath even the most proper of human facades. While this is a theme artists, particularly those of a literary or cinematic bent, return to over and over again (Grace Metalious' "seething novel of unchecked passion," Peyton Place, and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt are but two examples), the black-as-pitch humor of the Ealing films are shivery good fun, and their dark humor remains a particularly English phenomenon (there was only one Alec Guinness, ever)..."

Last Holiday
Film Review  January 13, 2006
Description: After being diagnosed with an incurable brain disease, a woman (who is played delightfully by Queen Latifah) discovers her moxie.

"...B. Priestley’s 1950 screenplay for Last Holiday starring Alec Guinness, the film is shameless – shameless, I tell you – with its fantasy shopping sequences and sports slapstick and grand-hotel hijinks (although I was delighted by Petr Vanek, who has a Richard E..."

Warlock: The Armageddon
Film Review  October 1, 1993
Description: Young Druids in Love. Anthony Hickox, who seems to be making quite a name for himself in the bad sequels department (his Hellraiser III seriously missed the mark), returns to...

"...Lifting whole passages from George Lucas's Star Wars (the young hero here might as well be named Skywalker for all the similarities), we're treated to extended scenes of the young warrior in training, using his own special version of the Force to blow up trees and zoom baseballs around. Alas, Alec Guinness is nowhere to be found, and the heroic pair have quite a time of it, trying to stave off Armageddon and lose their virginity all in the space of a few days..."

Solider of Fortune
Music Blog  April 23, 2009
Description: Thin Lizzy's “Still Dangerous,” just ask its anchoring guitarist Scott Gorham.

"...AC: Is he still that Obi-Wan Kenobi character for you – the ghost of Alec Guinness looking over your shoulder?..."

Letters at 3am
Columns  November 7, 2008
Description: Holden died a good death: just whiskey and a fall, no melodrama or fakery

"...That anyone would actually like life strikes him as surprising and interesting. Not because he's morose like Brando, cynical like Bogart, tortured like Monty Clift, or philosophical like Alec Guinness..."

DVD Watch
Screens Review  April 4, 2008
Description: This Chinese film dramatizing the Tiananmen Square massacre earned the director a five-year ban from making movies

"...The Fall of the Roman Empire: Limited Collector's Edition (Genius Products, $39.92): Alec Guinness, James Mason, and Christopher Plummer prove that not even the most powerful empire in history could survive an overabundance of theatrical elocution...."

DVD Watch
Screens Review  February 24, 2006
Description: If comedy is a dish best served black, Kind Hearts and Coronets is beluga caviar marinated in its own ink.

"...Founded at the turn of last century and resurrected at the dawn of this one, London's Ealing Studios shot from propaganda to Technicolor in its prime, 1938-1955, but remains eternally exalted for peerless UK ticklers The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Ladykillers. Like its crowning achievement, Robert Hamer's note-perfect horn blast of immortality, all of them weep with laughter and humble gratitude for Alec Guinness' divine grace..."

DVD Watch
Screens Review  December 9, 2005
Description: Criterion's 'Shoot the Piano Player' and 'Jules and Jim'

"...Also Out NowStar Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, $29.98): I can't believe I haven't seen this. I can't believe I want to.UpcomingKind Hearts and Coronets (Criterion, $39.95): Alec Guinness shines playing eight separate roles, not one of them a Jedi Knight...."

The Ladykillers
Film Review  March 26, 2004
Description: The Coen brothers remake a British comedy classic starring Tom Hanks in a flamboyantly love-him-or-hate-him performance.

"...The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy. That may have something to do with the fact that the film is also a liberal remake of the great Ealing Studios comedy of the same name, released in 1955 with a cast that still makes you tremble with anticipation: Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom, and Peter Sellers, the latter fresh from The Goon Show..."

The Tailor of Panama
Film Review  April 20, 2001
Description: Pierce Brosnan as a suave superspy toiling for Her Majesty's secret service? Now there's a stretch. Actually, once you get past The Tailor of Panama's sly little Bondian subterfuge, this...

"...There are echoes of films high and low scattered throughout Boorman's movie, the most obvious of which is the James Bond gag. The film also references the great Carol Reed comedy Our Man in Havana (Gleeson's besotted Abraxas clearly has a direct lineage to Ernie Kovacs, who played opposite Alec Guinness in Reed's 1960 film) and, in a roundabout fashion, James Cameron's True Lies, which similarly featured Curtis as a wife oblivious to her husband's double life..."

Snatch
Film Review  January 19, 2001
Description: Ritchie's second feature is part broad comic farce and part grisly charnel house humor.

"...It's John Woo minus the thieves' code of honor, transposed to modern-day comic-Cockney London. In other ways, Snatch also updates classic British heist comedies such as Charles Crichton's celebrated The Lavender Hill Mob -- no Alec Guinness, of course, but we do get ex-soccer bad boy Vinnie Jones and an incomprehensible Brad Pitt..."

Video Reviews
Screens Review  August 11, 2000

"...The earliest ones (Rambone, the softcore classic Flesh Gordon) were no doubt partially a response to the increasing role of sex in legitimate films during the Sixties and Seventies. Since then, however, it appears more likely that such sex epics as The Flintbones (previously reviewed in this column), E3: The Extra Testicle, and For Your Thighs Only were inspired by either simple boredom over at the "adult" film studios or in some cases, as a desperate way to provide gainful employment to willing but over-the-hill "stars." The real mystery about porno Hollywood knockoffs, however, is: Who the hell rents, or worse, buys these things? Do Anthony Burgess fans specifically request A Clockwork Orgy for their self-pleasuring activities? Are viewers of Lawrence of a Labia really expecting a cameo appearance from the late Alec Guinness? Has a dad ever actually brought home Pornocchio, Inspect Her Gadget, or even Mouse Cunt as a first adult "release" for his son who's entering puberty? Do devotees of the bard pore over the wordplay in A Midsummer Night's Wet Dream? Has anyone cried at the end of Schindler's Lust? Could even Albert Brooks himself imagine that Lust in America would have made it to the shelves? And how many people didn't pick up Edward Penishands 2 simply because they missed the first one and were afraid they'd have trouble catching up with the plot? (Actually, in the case of Penishands and many other such features, the "2" means that after the original feature was finished, the producers found out that one of their actresses was underage, so they had to recall the originals and shoot the whole film over again..."

Celebrated for the Least of Reasons
Books Story  October 15, 1999
Description: Chronicle reviewer Tom Doyal has took to writin' just like Larry L. King, the playwright behind The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (and much more, Doyal reveals, in his review of King's new book of letters).

"...King's plight is similar to that of the great English actor Alec Guinness, who trod the boards of the English stage and stood before the cameras of the world for almost 70 years and now lives in popular memory as Obi Wan Kenobi of Star Wars fame (much to his consternation), thus reducing a lifetime of brilliant work to a trivia question answer. I don't think King resents his connection with Whorehouse, about which he once quipped, "It made me about two-thirds rich." Not a line commonly heard from American writers these days, with a few notable exceptions..."

Reissues
Music Story  August 26, 1999

"...The well-designed booklet seems to take great pains to avoid discussing the origin of these recordings from Caedmon or the other sources, much less offer a list of the actors participating. That's a shame, because not only do Finney and Bloom star within, so too do Edith Evans, Alec Guinness, Vanessa Redgrave, Ian Holm, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, John Gielgud, Orson Welles, Judith Anderson, and many others whose dedication to the art of theatre gave contemporary shape to 400-year-old words...."

Lawrence of Arabia
Film Review  July 8, 1999
Description: This desert epic won seven Academy Awards and is best appreciated on the big screen. It's the biography of adventurer T.E. Lawrence, played by O'Toole in his first starring role....

"...Directed by: David Lean. Starring: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn..."

Scanlines
Screens Story  May 13, 1999

"...with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, voice of James Earl Jones...."

Scanlines
Screens Story  April 25, 1997

"...Chips epitomizes that sentimental type of humor that Alexander Macken-drick's 1951 The Man in the White Suit shies away from in favor of a more barbed trickle of satire aimed towards the highly bureaucratized British textile industry. Ealing Studio stalwart Alec Guinness stars with Joan Greenwood as a fumbling scientist who invents a fabric that never gets dirty, repels water, and never needs replacing..."

Star Wars: Special Edition
Film Review  January 31, 1997
Description: No synopsis necessary, I’ll presume. On the eve of commencing work on the new triumvirate that will make up the Star Wars trilogy’s prequels, wunderkind Lucas and 20th Century Fox...

"...Directed by: George Lucas. Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness..."

Scanlines
Screens Story  December 20, 1996

"...Kind Hearts and Coronets D: Robert Hamer; with Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Miles Malleson, Arthur Lowe. VHS Home Video Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th..."

Doctor Zhivago
Film Review  June 19, 1995
Description: Admittedly, this overlong and over-romantic Oscar-winning epic has never melted my personal tundra, but it's definitely quite the spectacle as directed by the modern-day king of epics, David Lean. The...

"...Directed by: David Lean. Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Tom Courtenay and Alec Guinness..."

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