With the scruffiest of miens, Gulley Jimson is an exuberant artist whose failures can be measured by their nobility. Played by Alec Guinness (who wrote the script based on Joyce Cary's novel), this hard-drinking visionary is fresh out of gaol and following his paintbrush where it will go. And it will go to any large surface, private or public. Jimson's alcoholic eloquence was inspired by Dylan Thomas, a friend of Cary's, but the most riotous set-piece was snatched from the life of Whistler. Here, Jimson fixates on a blank wall in a patron's house and while the couple are away on holiday paints a delirious mural, "Lazarus." When indoors proves too confining he moves outdoors to a massive church about to be demolished, completing "The Last Judgment." The ephemerality of this grand work is of little consequence. It is the paint on surface, the following of one's vision, that carries meaning. As the ever-irascible artist says, "Half a minute of revelation is worth more than a million years of know-nothing."-Steve Seid