As graduate-school alumni and several Nobel-nominated professors have noted, Alec Guinness and Queen Latifah don't look anything alike and, as performers, they are polar opposites. Latifah is a whooshing typhoon of sass and joy with the capacity for dramatic gravitas when it is called for but who seems often unable to fully reserve her bombastic persona. Guinness on the other hand is a chameleonic entertainer, often at his most powerful when saying very little and consistently expressive in his acting style.

These differences typify the broad alterations made between the original Last Holiday, released in 1950, and its 2006 remake directed by Wayne Wang. The film made with Guinness, directed by Henry Cass, was a peculiar comedy of manners that came down with a cruel irony near its bitter end. Guinness was still in the early days of his career when he portrayed George Bird, a crestfallen, dull farm-equipment salesman who gets diagnosed with a rare, terminal intestinal disease. Given a few months to live, he bundles up a saved 800 dollars and decides to blow it all at a posh retreat in the mountains.

Upon arrival, Bird (not a beaky bird) comes in contact with several species of blue-bloods and white-collars, taking the advice of a draconian housemaid (an excellent Kay Walsh) to not hold anything back from the snobs. This freedom, serendipitously, allows him the God-like ability to pass between social circles and be welcomed by all. The famous inventor loves his ideas on tractor maintenance; the friendly, rough-and-tumble East-Ender thinks they should go into business together. He even becomes a bit of a counsel for a cigar-chomping politico.

Written and produced by J.B. Priestley, one of the writers on Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, the film would not register above passable if not for its central figure. Two years after he embodied Fagin for David Lean's Oliver Twist, the young Guinness was becoming a sort of behavioral specimen that would make him so sought after in the years following. If he wasn't Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, he was at the very least their logical evolutionary foot forward; he was, in his own way, a two-man comedy team in a singular form, his rigid delivery the straight man and his inventive physicality its foil. Often compared to Peter Sellers, Guinness often referred to himself as an empty vessel being filled by the character he was portraying.

Even as he finds himself ensnared between two women, the focus remains on Guinness' delightfully uneasy non-snob. About an hour in, the film starts avalanching towards its fateful ending, picking up speed and losing much of its traction. Despite a talented cast and some classy framing from Cass, the minute the film stops working as an observational chronicle of Bird it begins to feel plotted and conventional. Guinness had already proved himself a deft performer at this stage -- Kind Hearts and Coronets had premiered the previous year -- but Last Holiday was the beginning of the end for any mere mortal who dared to share the screen with him.