|
|
Article: AS CLEAR AS GLASS : Sir Alec Guinness.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- September 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Since his death in England last month at age eighty-six, I have been reviewing the films I could find of the great and elusive Alec Guinness, and lamenting the ones I could not find or had never seen.
I have never seen The Prisoner (1955), in which he plays a Roman Catholic cardinal imprisoned in an Iron Curtain nation during the cold war--a man imprisoned also by his own beliefs and doubts. Guinness played the part on stage and in film, and is said to have been even better in the stage version. It strikes me as a role he was born to play, and one that no one else could play with his insight and sympathy.
He's awfully good in his two other priest roles: ...