Tunes of Glory

The film, set in 1948,[2] opens in an officers' mess of an unnamed Highland Regiment. Acting Lieutenant Colonel Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) announces this will be his last day as commanding officer. The hard-drinking Sinclair, who is still gazetted as a major despite being in command since the battalion's last full colonel was killed in action during the North African campaign of the Second World War, is to be replaced by the teetotal lieutenant colonel, Basil Barrow (John Mills). Although Sinclair led the battalion through the remainder of the war, winning a DSO and MM during El Alamein, Monte Cassino, and "from Dover to Berlin", Brigade HQ considers Barrow a more appropriate peacetime commanding officer. A drunken Sinclair reveals his frustrations at his lowly rank versus Barrow: "I've acted Colonel, I should be Colonel, and by God... I will be Colonel!"

Colonel Barrow arrives early and observes the battalion's officers dancing rowdily, including Major Sinclair. Barrow and Sinclair icily swap their military backgrounds. Sinclair joined the regiment as an enlisted bandsman in Glasgow and rose through the ranks, winning the Military Medal and Distinguished Service Order during the war. Barrow by contrast came to the regiment from Eton then Oxford University, both in England, and that his ancestors were colonels of the regiment before him – although Barrow served only a year with the regiment back in 1933 before being posted to "special duties", including lecturing at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He has been fifteen years away from the battalion. When Sinclair humorously recounts he was briefly in Barlinnie Prison for being drunk and disorderly (also in 1933), Barrow reticently mentions his experience as a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. Sinclair dismissively assumes Barrow received preferential treatment as an officer ("officers' privileges and amateur dramatics") but in fact Barrow is deeply psychologically scarred after being tortured by the Japanese, which he does not tell Sinclair who not-so-privately resents his replacement by a "stupid wee man".

Meanwhile, Morag (Susannah York), Sinclair's daughter, is observed illicitly meeting an enlisted piper (John Fraser).

Barrow immediately passes several orders designed to instil discipline in the battalion that Sinclair had allowed to slip. Particularly controversial is an order that all officers take lessons in Highland dancing in an effort to make their customary rowdy style more formal and suitable for mixed company. However the unchanged energetic dancing of the officers, led by a drunken Sinclair at Barrow's first cocktail party with the townspeople, incites his anger. An outburst by Barrow only further damages his own authority.

Tensions come to a head when Major Sinclair publicly assaults the uniformed piper he discovers with his daughter in a pub – "bashing a corporal" as he put it. Barrow decides an official report to the Brigade must be made, meaning an imminent court-martial, even though he is aware the action will further erode his popularity and authority within the battalion. Barrow is eventually persuaded to back down by Sinclair, who promises Barrow that he will support him in the future ("We'd make a good team."). The decision further undermines his authority, as Sinclair's promised support never materializes, and the other officers, notably Captain Alec Rattray (Richard Leech), treat him with a renewed lack of respect. The second in command, Major Charlie Scott, with glacial cruelty, implies that it is Sinclair who is really running the battalion, because he forced Barrow to dismiss the charges against him. Alienated now from both Sinclair's clique and the officers who formerly supported him, from the officers recreation area a shot is heard and investigation confirms that Barrow has shot himself dead (the actual event is unseen).

With the colonel's death, Sinclair realises he is to blame. He calls the officers to a meeting and announces plans for a grandiose funeral fit for a field marshal, complete with a march through the town in which all the "tunes of glory" will be played by the pipers. He lists the tunes he wishes to be played: "Scotland the Brave", "The Nut Brown Maiden" and "The Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee". When it is pointed out how out disproportionate the plans are to the circumstances, especially given the manner of the colonel's death, Sinclair insists that it was not suicide but murder. He tells everyone he himself was the murderer and the other senior officers were his accomplices with the exception of the colonel's adjutant.

Sinclair suffers a nervous breakdown and is escorted from the barracks while the officers and men salute as he passes during the closing scene.

The film was initially to be made at Ealing Studios, with Michael Relph as producer and Jack Hawkins playing Sinclair. At the time that it was at Ealing, Kenneth Tynan, then working as a script reader, criticized the first draft screenplay as having "too much army-worship in it." That view was shared by director Alexander Mackendrick. By the time Kennaway rewrote the script, Ealing had lost interest and Hawkins was no longer available. The film was then picked up by the independent producer Colin Leslie, who interested Mills in the project.[2]

Accounts differ as to how the leading roles were cast. Mills wrote that he and Guinness "tossed for it," while Guinness recalled that he had originally been offered the role of Barrow but preferred Sinclair. The role of Barrow might have been too close to that of Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Sinclair has been described as "anti-Nicholson".[2]

Tunes of Glory was shot at Shepperton Studios in London. The film's sets were designed by the art director Wilfred Shingleton. Establishing location shots were done at Stirling Castle in Stirling, Scotland. Stirling Castle is the Regimental Headquarters of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders[3] but in fact James Kennaway served with the Gordon Highlanders. Although the production was initially offered broad co-operation to film within the castle from the commanding officer there, as long as it didn't disrupt the regiment's [Argyll's] routine, after seeing a lurid paperback cover for Kennaway's book, that co-operation evaporated, and the production was only allowed to shoot distant exterior shots of the castle.[1]

Director Ronald Neame worked with Guinness on The Horse's Mouth (1958), and a number of other participants were also involved in both films, including actress Kay Walsh, cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson and editor Anne V. Coates.[1] The film was Susannah York's film debut.[3]

Writing in Esquire, Dwight Macdonald called Tunes of Glory a "limited but satisfying tale," and wrote that "it is one of those films, like Zinnemann’s Sundowners, which are of little interest cinematically and out of fashion thematically (no sex, no violence, no low life) and yet manage to be very good entertainment."[4]

The film was praised by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who wrote "Not only do Alec Guinness and John Mills superlatively adorn the two top roles in this drama of professional military men, but also every actor, down to the walk-ons, acquits himself handsomely."[5]

Variety called Ronald Neame’s direction "crisp and vigorous," and said that Mills had a "tough assignment" to appear opposite Guinness, "particularly in a fundamentally unsympathetic role, but he is always a match for his co-star."[6]

The film's screenplay, and especially the final scene showing Sinclair's breakdown, was criticized by some critics at the time of release. One critic wrote in Sight & Sound that the ending was "inexcusable" and that the scene is "far less one of tragic remorse than gauchely contrived emotionalism."[2]

Tunes of Glory has a 73% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregation site.[7]

James Kennaway, who adapted the screenplay from his novel, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost to Elmer Gantry. It also received numerous BAFTA nominations, including Best Film, Best British Film, Best British Screenplay and Best Actor nominations for both Guinness and Mills.[8]

The film was the official British entry at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, and John Mills won the Best Actor award there.[3] That same year the film was named "Best Foreign Film" by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.[9]

Tunes of Glory was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Monday Play by B.C. Cummins in April 1976.

Tunes of Glory was adapted for the stage by Michael Lunney, who directed a production of it which toured Britain in 2006.[10][11]

Tunes of Glory is available on DVD from Criterion and Metrodome. It was released on Blu-ray by Criterion in December 2019 with a 4K digital restoration.

Alfred Hitchcock called Tunes of Glory "one of the best films ever made," Neil Sinyard writes in The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, "so it is curious that the film rarely finds a place in the established canon of great British films." It was not included in the list of 100 greatest British films of the century compiled by the British Film Institute in 1999. Sinyard observes that the film came too late to be part of the spate of popular 1950s British war films, and was too dark to be part of that genre. He notes that it seemed "slightly old-fashioned" when compared to British New Wave films that came out at the time, such as Room at the Top.[2]

Tunes of Glory was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2018.[12]

• Tunes of Glory at IMDb
• Tunes of Glory at the TCM Movie Database
• Tunes of Glory at AllMovie
• Tunes of Glory at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Tunes of Glory an essay by Robert Murphy at the Criterion Collection