It's October 10, 2008, and I've just watched Tunes Of Glory on DVD. I give you the date because it is now more than 52 years since the end of World War II and that is relevant. Tunes Of Glory is about unresolved grief for friends and comrades in arms who have died in battle. Those now very old men who fought in WWII, those who fought in Korea, those who fought in Vietnam and Iraq, and those who fought in the many other smaller engagements around the world since then might be familiar with that grief, but a great many of us won't. Are great many of us are the baby-boomers who grew up to smoke dope and sneer at our father's generation and the occasional show of emotion they felt for friends and comrades alongside whom they had fought and who, unlike them, had been unable to cheat death. My father, born in 1923 and who enlisted in 1942, took part in the D-Day invasion in June 1944. He finally developed cancer in the late Eighties and died in 1991. But oddly enough he, a man who was always something of a hypochondriac all his life, spoke nor one word of complaint when he was, for once, very ill and knew he was to die. He said that after seeing so many of his friends and comrades killed in the war, every day since then had been a gift and he could not complain now that his life was finally going to come to an end. Tunes Of Glory is a film for his generation. The two main characters, portrayed by Alec Guinness and John Mills, have neither of them really come to terms with their experiences in the war and the deaths of comrades in arms, but both coped with it in different ways. Mills retreats into being a stickler but that doesn't save him from his grief. Guinness copes far better but is still damaged, but at least he survives. Both are very different characters, both strong in their own way, but both also weak. The Mills character, ironically, demonstrates his strength by going against the grain and giving way. The Guinness character's weakness is more hidden - he has the affection and loyalty of his men, but his flaw is that that affection and loyalty is vital to him. Without it and the battalion he led for a while, it seems that his whole life might fall apart. The film itself is quite static and this production would not be out of place on a stage. But that is no criticism. It is not a director's film, but an actor's film - you watch the film for the story and acting, not the direction and cinematography. In that sense it is quite old-fashioned, but that, too, is no criticism. The only drawback is that it might mean nothing at all to the MTV generation and that it might only be fully appreciated again once - heaven forbid - we have another world war and once again men and women are destined to cope somehow with a grief they find almost impossible to express. In that sense - in the sense that until this planet becomes uninhabitable and mankind ceases to exist, we will always go to war and we will always lose friends and comrade in arms and we will always ask ourselves: why did I survive but not him or her - this film will always carry an emotional clout and will be timeless.
Review of Tunes of Glory
