The DVD Report #98

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, what better time to talk about my favorite Irish films? Here then my chronological evaluation of a baker’s dozen. Ten are available on DVD, and three that aren’t, but should be.

No one made more films about the Irish than John Ford whose characters seemed to be Irish even when they were supposed to be Welsh or Norwegian. Fittingly, Ford won the first of his record four directing Oscars for 1935’s The Infomer.

Small in scope, The Infomer is ostensibly about the Irish “troubles” in the long-fought war between the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and the oppressive Brits who control Northern Ireland. What it really is, though, is a Judas story in which simpleton Victor McLaglen betrays his friend, Wallace Ford, for forty pieces of silver. The narrative of the story follows McLaglen’s temptation, collusion and the pangs of conscience that bring the story to its inevitable conclusion. Highly atmospheric, the fog-enshrouded scenes are mainly due to Ford’s having to cover up the obviously cheap sets at RKO.

In addition to McLaglen, who also won an Oscar for the film, there are standout performances by Ford, Margot Grahame as a prostitute, and the usually boisterous Una O’Connor as Wally Ford’s quietly suffering mother. Dudley Nichols’ screenplay and Max Steiner’s score were also awarded Oscars, making it a haul of four out of its six nominations, which also included those for Best Picture and Editing.

There isn’t a lot to Lloyd Bacon’s The Irish in Us (1935) beyond the casting, but it’s the casting that makes it memorable. James Cagney (the fight promoter), Pat O’Brien (the cop) and Frank McHugh (the fireman) are the battling brothers while wonderful Mary Gordon is their long-suffering mother. Enter Olivia de Havilland as the girl who comes between Cagney and O’Brien and Allen Jenkins as Cagney’s pugilist and there you have it.

This was Mary Gordon’s largest screen role. The diminutive Scottish actress made close to 300 films from 1925 to 1950 but many of her appearances were uncredited walk-ons or films in which she only had a line or two. She is best remembered as Mrs. Hudson, the housekeeper to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson, in the series of films they made from 1939 to 1946 beginning with The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Irish in Us is oddly enough not on DVD, even though most Cagney/O’Brien pairings are.

Rousing entertainment that suited its World War II audiences to a fare-thee-well, Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) gave us the great Irish-American showman of the mid-20th Century, James Cagney, as the great Irish-American showman of the early part of the century, George M. Cohan. Cohan, who was actually born on the 3rd, not the 4th, of July as he proclaimed, was a star from childhood to his death five months after the film opened.

His songs were a mix of the patriotic and the sentimental, all put over with verve and style. Cagney, who began as a song and dance man before becoming a star in gangster roles, astonished audiences with his musical prowess as the actor-singer-composer-producer. He is wonderfully supported by Joan Leslie as a composite of his two wives, Rosemary DeCamp as his mother, and especially Walter Huston as his father. The film won three Oscars including one for Cagney and was nominated for another five including Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor (Huston).

Even more successful as the war raged on, Leo McCarey’s Going My Way (1944) gave us not one, not two, but three Irish-American priests: Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Frank McHugh. Crosby, at the height of his popularity, is totally believable singing while saving souls and irascible Fitzgerald became the only actor nominated for Oscars for the same performance in both lead and supporting actor categories. Both won, as did the film, and as did McCarey, accounting for four of the film’s seven Oscars out of its ten nominations.

The Irish “troubles” were back in Carol Reed’s somber but engrossing Odd Man Out (1947) in which an Irish rebel leader in an unnamed city (obviously Belfast) hides from the Brits. Will he be caught? Will he be betrayed? It’s all handled with a mastery of suspense by its brilliant director with a mesmerizing performance by James Mason as the man on the run, supported by a sturdy cast that includes Kathleen Ryan, Robert Newton, Cyril Cusack, F.J. McCormack, Fay Compton and Dan O’Herlihy. Alas, its sole Oscar nomination was for editing.

Location filming was rare in the early 1950s when John Ford took his cameras to Ireland to film The Quiet Man (1952), his long time dream project with John Wayne as a retired boxer and Maureen O’Hara as the Irish lass he sets his cap for. Beautifully filmed in vibrant colors, Ford’s film is filled with colorful characters not the least of which are Victor McLaglen as O’Hara’s boisterous brother, Mildred Natwick as the widow who loves him, Ward Bond as the local priest, and Barry Fitzgerald as, well, Barry Fitzgerald. The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won two, for Ford’s direction and its fantastic cinematography.

Ford won a DGA (Directors Guild of America) nomination for The Long Gray Line (1955) but failed to receive an Oscar nod for this sentimental biography of Marty Maher, the Irish immigrant who had many jobs at West Point during the course of his long career there. Tyrone Power has one of his best roles as Maher and Maureen O’Hara is every bit his match as his feisty wife. Her death scene in its brilliant simplicity provides a master class in acting all by itself. As with all Ford films, there is a large and vibrant supporting cast including Donald Crisp, Sean McClory, Ward Bond, Robert Francis, William Leslie, Betsy Palmer, Patrick Wayne, and Harry Carey Jr. as Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is truly one of the unsung gems of Ford’s career.

Although he would go on to make nine more films over the next eight years, Ford was feeling his age at 64 when he made 1958’s The Last Hurrah, an “old man’s movie” if there ever was one. Based on Edwin O’Connor’s novel about a long time Irish-American mayor of a major New England city (obviously Boston), the film is full of nostalgia for a time gone by. Spencer Tracy, in one of his great performances, is Frank Skeffington, the old-style mayor running what he knows will be his last re-election campaign against a well-oiled TV advertising campaign by the supporters of his vacuous smiling young opponent. Jeffrey Hunter is Tracy’s reporter nephew brought in as an observer to the campaign while a gallery of legendary supporting players is each given a chance to shine. Among them are Pat O’Brien, James Gleason, Donald Crisp, Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Jane Darwell, Anna Lee, Edward Brophy and Ricardo Cortez. Tracy and Ford won National Board of Review awards for their efforts but neither received an Oscar nod though Tracy was nominated for The Old Man and the Sea instead.

One of the best films yet made about the Irish “troubles”, Michael Anderson’s Shake Hands With the Devil (1959) provided James Cagney with one his best late-career roles as a Dublin professor by day, and an IRA leader by night. Cagney’s character here is about as close as he came to reprising his hate-filled maniac in White Heat, a brilliant characterization of a man torn between saving lives during the light day and taking them in the dark of night. Don Murray is the film’s conscience as one of Cagney’s students and Dana Wynter, Glynis Johns, Michael Redgrave, Sybil Thorndike, Cyril Cusack and Richard Harris all provide memorable support.

Shake Hands With the Devil is criminally missing on DVD.

John Ford’s penultimate film, 1965’s Young Cassidy, is based on the autobiography of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, inexplicably re-named Johnny Cassidy for the film.

Ford became ill during the filming and had to be replaced by Jack Cardiff but the production is so seamless it’s impossible to tell who directed which scenes. Rod Taylor has one of his best roles as the initially-misunderstood writer and manages to hold his own against some of the greatest actors and actresses of the 20th Century at the peak of their prowess.

Maggie Smith is particularly memorable in a BAFTA-nominated performance as O’Casey’s lost love, but right behind her are Flora Robson in a late career triumph as his dying mother, a glowing Julie Christie as a rich man’s mistress with whom he has a brief dalliance, Edith Evans as the Abbey Theatre’s Lady Gregory, and Michael Redgrave as Yeats. Also effective are Sian Phillips, Jack MacGowran and T.P. McKenna as O’Casey’s siblings, and Donal Donnelly as a particularly nasty hearse driver.

Young Cassidy is shamefully among the missing on DVD.

One of the greatest of Broadway musicals, Burton Lane and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow waited more than twenty years to be filmed. By 1968 its once savagely potent take on American patriotism, racism, fear of sex and Irish blarney had become more than a little tame. Worse, the production was “updated” to the sixties where it was decidedly out of place. Francis Ford Coppola’s heavy handed direction makes the non-musical sections move at a deadly pace, but fortunately there’s still the wondrous score and Fred Astaire, Petula Clark, Tommy Steele and others to do it full justice.

Harburg, who was also the lyricist for The Wizard of Oz, was at his peak with such songs as “How Are Things in Glocca Moora”, “Look to the Rainbow”, “That Old Devil Moon”, “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love (I Love the Girl I’m Near)”, “Necessity”, “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” and “The Begat” – “when the begat got to get under par, they brought in the daughters of the D.A.R.”

Finian’s Rainbow did well at the Golden Globes winning nominations for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, Actor (Astaire), Actress (Clark), Supporting Actress (Barbara Hancock) and Newcomer (Hancock again), but was nominated for only two Oscars for its adapted score and for its overall sound.

Sumptuously filmed on the Irish coast and on the beaches of Cape Town, South Africa, David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970) was unfairly lambasted by critics expecting a larger than life story befitting its grand scale. Alas, it is not that but a simple story of a gentle Irish schoolmaster played by Robert Mitchum and of the bigotry endemic to small town life the world over where if you’re different you are ostracized. Such is the case with Mitchum’s wife Rosy (Sarah Miles), the restless daughter of Ryan, the town’s pub owner (Leo McKern). Set at the time of the Irish “troubles”, Rosy is found out to have had a fling with a British officer (Christopher Jones) resulting in her being tarred and feathered and dragged through the streets.

Audiences were somewhat taken aback by Mitchum’s low-keyed portrayal of the cuckolded husband, not the role one would expect to see him play, but he was fine, holding his own against a stalwart cast that also included an outstanding Trevor Howard as the village priest and John Mills as the village idiot.

The film did well at the BAFTAs, winning ten nominations including Best Film, Actress (Miles), Supporting Actor (Mills) and Director but failed to win any of them. It did win Mills the Supporting Actor award at the Golden Globes where Miles and Howard were also nominated. It then received four Oscar nominations including Best Actress and Sound. Mills repeated his Golden Globe win and Freddie Young also won for his amazing Cinematography, but that was it.

Kirk Jones’ hilarious 1998 comedy Waking Ned Devine was not filmed in Ireland, but on the British Isle of Man which has been standing in for Ireland at least as far back as 1946’s I See a Dark Stranger.

The devilish tale of a lottery winner who dies of shock before he can collect his fortune, the film, like all of those mentioned here, is worth a look any day of the year, not just on St. Patrick’s Day. Ian Bannen, David Kelly and Fionnula Flanagan star.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 17, 2009)