A FOREIGN FIELD Tribute to Alec Guinness

AFI Fest is honored to pay tribute to one of the greatest stars of British cinema, Sir Alec Guinness. His featured role in A Foreign Field, presented in this special gala, was written expressly for him by screen writer Roy Clarke. The seventy-nine year old actor’s career on screen has panned six decades and garnered him an Academy Award for his performance in Bridge on the River Kwai and nominations for The Lavendar Hill Mob and Star Wars. His extraordinary versatility was challenged by the great Ealing comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit, as well as David Lean’s adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Featured in Lean’s later masterpieces, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India, Guinness was embraced by a younger generation for his Jedi master in the blockbuster Star Wars trilogy. Sir Alec Guinness shares the screen with an all-star cast in A Foreign Field, a superb mixture of laughter and tears written for him by Roy Clarke and directid by Charles Sturridge (Brideshead Revisited, Where Angels Fear to Tread’). There won’t be a dry eye i·n the house by the end of this wonderful film. Two British veterans of the D-Day landings, Cyril (Leo McKern) and Amos Guinness) return to Normandy for the first time in fifty years to visit the grave of a wartime buddy and to look up a French girl named Angelique (Jeanne Moreau) who befriended the Allied soldiers in ’44. Also searching for Angelique is American vet Waldo (John Randolph), whose nervous daughter (Geraldine Chaplin) and son-in-law (Edward Herrmann) keep a watchful eye on him. A mysterious American widow Lisa (Lauren Bacall) joins the two parties as they cross paths, reminisce and share hilarious adventures.