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DVD review: The Horse's Mouth

The now 97-year-old Ronald Neame worked with Alec Guinness on five important British films: as producer of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist , and director of The Card, The Horse's Mouth and Tunes of Glory, made when we had a properly functioning film industry. The neglected Horse's Mouth is a labour of love by Guinness. He adapted it from Joyce Cary's rambunctious novel and himself played the outsize, monomaniacal, bohemian artist Gulley Jimson, whom we first meet as he emerges from Wormwood Scrubs after his latest mad escapade.

It's a beguiling film with an outstanding supporting cast (Kay Walsh, Ernest Thesiger, Robert Coote, Michael Gough et al), seductive colour photography by Arthur Ibbetson, precise editing by Anne V Coates (later to win an Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia ), and a score adapted from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé.