Tunes of Glory (1960)

I haven't seen many movies that depict the military outside of wartime. This one is set in Scotland in 1948, so only the freshest soldiers wouldn't have seen action a few years earlier.

Maj. Sinclair (Alec Guinness) has had significant successes and honors, but instead of getting promoted to colonel, he learns that he will no longer be acting commanding officer of his regiment in peacetime. His replacement is Lt. Col. Barrow (John Mills), who's much bigger on discipline and thus less popular with the men. Sinclair finds himself under more stress than any of those men, not least when he illegally takes his anger out on a corporal piper (John Fraser) who's dating his daughter (debutante Susannah York) on the sly.

The Prisoner (1955)

This has nothing to do with the hit '67 TV series of the same title. That said, it is another British program in which nobody has a given name and the setting is ambiguous. All we know for sure is that the nation used to be under Nazi rule and is now under communist rule.

A cardinal (Alec Guinness) gets arrested on the dubious charge of treason against the regime, which, of course, will put him on trial only when he's almost certain to confess. He is not subjected to physical torture, whether because his captors want to be more civil than that, couldn't hope to break someone the Nazis couldn't that way, or really don't want to risk martyring him in the public eye. Instead, his interrogator (Jack Hawkins) takes a faux-friendly approach, made all the more possible by their past acquaintance. It takes longer than the superiors like, but the interrogator is determined to find a chink in the emotional armor.

Murder by Death (1976)

I swear I didn't mean to rent two Peter Falk flicks in a row. Ironically, the point was to see something rather unlike the first. Certainly the genre is different, and Falk is no worse suited to comedy. I still knew this to be a gamble, partly because Neil Simon wrote it.

Eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote, the only time he acted without narrating or playing himself) summons ten humans and a terrier, all famous detectives or their companions, to his secluded mansion for "dinner and a murder." There is no dead body when they arrive, but the atmosphere is deliberately creepy, and they narrowly evade several traps. The blind butler (Alec Guinness) notes his employer's macabre sense of humor but appears unaware of any actual danger. At dinner, Twain announces that someone will be murdered in an hour and that the victim and culprit are both at the table; whoever correctly solves the mystery gets a million bucks. He leaves the room, and the guests are reluctant to split up....

The Horse's Mouth (1958)

So I took a chance on another Alec Guinness comedy. I'm not sure why I put it on my queue, but Netflix describes it as one of his strangest, making it perhaps even more of a gamble. I learned later that director Robert Neame made some dramas I enjoyed but also comedies that didn't do much for me.

Guinness plays the oddly named Gulley Jimson, a little-known painter. He has trouble making ends meet that way, so he resorts to criminal, legally gray, or just plain undignified means. Unlike most scoundrels, he seems to care more about leaving his artistic mark than making money. For example, when some aristocrats want to buy an older painting (in his ex's tenacious possession), he decides to paint right on their blank wall without express permission during their vacation. Another act involves a group mural on a church slated for demolition. (The title connects to a throwaway line that IMDb users haven't seen fit to record.)

Our Man in Havana (1959)

My prior experience of director Carol Reed, while pretty good, did not whet my appetite for more. But when I saw that he got back together with author Graham Greene, I thought that this might be the closest I'd get to another The Third Man.

Shot shortly after the Cuban Revolution but set slightly before it, the film focuses on a transplanted English vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness). A member of the British Secret Service invites him to become a spy, because such a man doesn't arouse much suspicion. Netflix says he "unwittingly" agrees, but that's misleading: He knows what his employer is and what it expects of him; he just bites off more than he can chew, failing to recruit a team. Too desperate for money to admit defeat -- thanks largely to extravagant young adult daughter Milly, despite her dating the generous local despot (Ernie Kovacs) -- Wormold lies about both recruits and discoveries in espionage. By the time he receives some actual teammates, most notably his secretary (Maureen O'Hara), he starts to worry he'll be found out. But that shouldn't be his biggest worry, seeing as an unnamed enemy agency takes him as seriously as his own does. Burl Ives has a supporting role as a German friend who meets the enemy.