Tunes of Glory is a 1960 British drama film directed by Ronald Neame, starring Alec Guinness and John Mills, featuring Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, John Fraser, Duncan MacRae, Gordon Jackson and Susannah York.

The film is a psychological drama focusing on events in a wintry Scottish Highland regimental barracks in the period immediately following the Second World War.

[3] Writer Kennaway served with the Gordon Highlanders, and the title refers to the bagpiping that accompanies every important action of the battalion.

Although Sinclair led the battalion through the remainder of the war, winning a DSO as he took it "from Dover to Berlin" (he also holds a Military Medal, a medal only awarded to Other Ranks), Brigade HQ considers Barrow – whose ancestor founded the battalion – a more appropriate peacetime commanding officer.

Men who have been raucously dancing for decades are insulted and angry at being told not to raise their arms overhead.

He later calls a meeting to announce his plans for a grandiose funeral, complete with a march through the town in which the pipers will play "tunes of glory".

The film was initially to be made at Ealing Studios, with Michael Relph as producer and Jack Hawkins playing Sinclair.

At the time that it was at Ealing, Kenneth Tynan, then working as a script reader, criticized the first draft screenplay as having "too much army-worship in it".

Although the production was initially offered broad co-operation to film within the castle from the commanding officer there, as long as it didn't disrupt the regiment's [Argyll's] routine, after seeing a lurid paperback cover for Kennaway's book, that co-operation evaporated, and the production was only allowed to shoot distant exterior shots of the castle.

[3] Director Ronald Neame worked with Guinness on The Horse's Mouth (1958), and a number of other participants were also involved in both films, including actress Kay Walsh, cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson and editor Anne V.

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "In Tunes of Glory, Ronald Neame and his writer James Kennaway have sketched in the corruptions, tensions and intrigues of life in a Highland Regiment's officers' quarters with enough acerbity to make an interesting melodrama.

Nevertheless there are goodish supporting performances from Dennis Price, Gordon Jackson and Duncan Macrae; all the scenes in which Barrow makes his presence newly felt are observed with brisk authority; and the sets are suitably claustrophobic.

Though Alec Guinness (made up to look alarmingly like Stan Laurel) can only intermittently suggest a tough, blaspheming old campaigner, John Mills succeeds in establishing the gradual cracking of Barrow’s confidence with a nervous conviction not always evident in the parts written.

"[6] Writing in Esquire, Dwight Macdonald called Tunes of Glory a "limited but satisfying tale", and wrote that "it is one of those films, like Zinnemann's Sundowners (1960), which are of little interest cinematically and out of fashion thematically (no sex, no violence, no low life) and yet manage to be very good entertainment".

[7] The film was praised by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who wrote "Not only do Alec Guinness and John Mills superlatively adorn the two top roles in this drama of professional military men, but also every actor, down to the walk-ons, acquits himself handsomely.

"[8] Variety called Ronald Neame's direction "crisp and vigorous", and said that Mills had a "tough assignment" to appear opposite Guinness, "particularly in a fundamentally unsympathetic role, but he is always a match for his co-star".

[9] The film's screenplay, and especially the final scene showing Sinclair's breakdown, was criticised by some critics at the time of release.

One critic wrote in Sight & Sound that the ending was "inexcusable" and that the scene is "far less one of tragic remorse than gauchely contrived emotionalism".