Tunes of Glory

Tunes of Glory is a 1960 British drama film directed by Ronald Neame, starring Alec Guinness and John Mills, featuring Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, John Fraser, Duncan MacRae, Gordon Jackson and Susannah York. It is based on the 1956 novel and screenplay by James Kennaway. The film is a psychological drama focusing on events in a wintry Scottish Highland regimental barracks in the period immediately following the Second World War. Writer Kennaway served with the Gordon Highlanders, and the title refers to the bagpiping that accompanies every important action of the battalion.
In January 1948, at the officers' mess of a Highland battalion, Jock Sinclair announces that this is his last day as acting commanding officer. Sinclair, who is still only a major despite having been in command (as a brevet lieutenant colonel) since the battalion's last full colonel died during the North Africa Campaign, is to be replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow. Although Sinclair led the battalion through the remainder of the war, Brigade HQ considers Barrow – whose ancestor founded the battalion – a more appropriate peacetime commanding officer.
Colonel Barrow arrives a day early and finds the officers dancing and declines sharing a whisky with Sinclair. Whilst Sinclair enlisted as a bandsman and rose through the ranks, Barrow came from Oxford University. He served with the battalion in 1933 and was later a prisoner of the Japanese, whilst Sinclair has only beein in Barlinnie Prison's cooler for being drunk and disorderly.
Meanwhile, Sinclair's daughter, Morag, secretly meets an enlisted piper, Corporal Ian Fraser, as Barrow starts to pass orders designed to instill strict battalion discipline. Particularly resented is an order that all officers take lessons in "proper" Scottish country dancing to prepare for the cocktail party Barrow is planning as the first postwar official barracks party. Men who have been raucously dancing for decades are insulted and angry at being told not to raise their arms overhead. The townspeople enjoy the party, but the dancing becomes rowdy and Barrow ends the proceedings and drives off in a jeep, clearly distressed.
Sinclair finds Corporal Fraser with Morag in a pub and punches him, which is a serious offence and Barrow decides to begin a court-martial. Sinclair persuades Barrow to back down, promising support in the future, but Sinclair and other officers sit apart from Barrow and virtually ignore him in the mess. In the billiard room, Scott says that Sinclair is really in charge and suggests that Barrow join the other followers. Distraught, Barrow leaves and a gunshot is heard, the men finding that he has shot himself in the tub room.
Sinclair calls a meeting to announce his plans for a grandiose funeral, complete with a march through the town in which the pipers will play "tunes of glory". When one officer points to the manner of Barrow's death, Sinclair insists that it was not suicide, but murder, he being the murderer and the other senior officers accomplices. While Sinclair loses himself in his vision of the cortège, everyone leaves except Cairns and Scott. Sinclair buries his head in his tam and sobs, after which he is helped from the barracks. Cairns rides with him as he is driven away, with officers and men saluting as he passes and bagpipes playing as snow begins to fall.
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 Lesslie, who interested Mills in the project.
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".
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 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.
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. The film was Susannah York's film debut.
The original pipe music was composed by Malcolm Arnold, who also wrote the music for The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The film was generally well received by critics, the acting in particular garnering praise.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "In Tunes of Glory, Ronald Neame and his writer James Kennaway have sketched in the corruptions, tensions and intrigues of life in a Highland Regiment's officers' quarters with enough acerbity to make an interesting melodrama. Unfortunately one cannot put it higher than that. It is not merely that they have thrown away a good idea on an embarrassingly sentimental ending; they have lowered the temperature throughout by throwing in such irrelevancies as a thread or two of conventionally handled love interest ... and some stagy exhibitions of quaint humour on the part of the lower ranks. False touches and caricature abound; sympathies switch disconcertingly from side to side as the plot, rather than the disappointingly underdeveloped characters, dictates. Nevertheless there are goodish supporting performances from Dennis Price, Gordon Jackson and Duncan Macrae; all the scenes in which Barrow makes his presence newly felt are observed with brisk authority; and the sets are suitably claustrophobic. Though Alec Guinness (made up to look alarmingly like Stan Laurel) can only intermittently suggest a tough, blaspheming old campaigner, John Mills succeeds in establishing the gradual cracking of Barrow’s confidence with a nervous conviction not always evident in the parts written."
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 (1960), 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".
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."
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".
The film's screenplay, and especially the final scene showing Sinclair's breakdown, was criticised 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".
Tunes of Glory has a 73% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregation site.
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.
The film was the official British entry at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, and John Mills won the Best Actor award there. That same year the film was named "Best Foreign Film" by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Tunes of Glory was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Monday Play by B.C. Cummins in April 1976.
It was adapted for the stage by Michael Lunney, who directed a production of it which toured Britain in 2006.
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.
Tunes of Glory was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2018.