Aubrey MaloneAubrey Malone reviews some key portrayals of the Rising on the silver screen
The main problem with political films is politics. By which I mean they often wear their hearts too unashamedly on their sleeves. They tend to serve us up polemics instead of dramas – an area better served by documentaries – or simplify conflicts to fit the (often threadbare) plots.
Such was the case with one of the first films I ever saw about The Troubles, Michael Anderson’s Shake Hands with the Devil (1959). There was a lot of excitement about James Cagney – most people’s favourite movie gangster of the time – arriving in Ireland to make the film. The country willed it to do well, especially in view of Cagney’s Irish heritage.
He played a doctor drawn into the armed struggle but a bigger struggle was with his character – and accent. The battle between the IRA and the Black and Tans was too broadly drawn, verging on caricature at times. Neither were matters helped by the narrative contrivance of having Cagney’s colleague Don Murray (the ‘prettyboy’ of the piece) falling in love with an attractive British hostage (Dana Wynter).
Someone seemed to have their fingerprints on Brendan Behan’s The Hostage but the film didn’t reprise Behan’s poignancy. Despite some credible scenes, for most of the time it played out as standard issue Hollywood melodrama.
Impressed
I was more impressed by John Ford’s The Informer (1935). Here Victor McLaglen paid the full price for his Judas-like betrayal of ‘The Cause’ for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver (actually £20). Ford, unlike Anderson, understood characters had to be fleshed out in projects like this or they tended to be trampled on by agitprop concerns. Where Cagney roared, McLaglen whispered. He showed a chiaroscuro of emotions and was rewarded with an Oscar for his troubles.
Another interesting IRA film from Hollywood’s back pages was Sir Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). This had James Mason as a freedom fighter planning a heist to raise funds for the nationalist cause. It suffered from the same comic-book attitude to republicanism as The Gentle Gunman five years later. This had the unlikely prospect of Dirk Bogarde and John Mills playing two republican brothers. It didn’t seem to strike film-makers to fill such roles with Irish people who might have some empathy with the political situation – or at least sound Irish.
In 1959, Seán Mac Réamoinn wrote Mise Eire, a documentary charting events leading up to, during, and after the Rising. It used original newsreel footage. This was obligatory viewing for school children of my era. It was the first feature film to be released in the Irish language. RTÉ came up with another novel idea to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966, airing an eight-part series called Insurrection. Part drama and part documentary, it was cleverly framed as a series of news broadcasts.
It chronicled the happenings of 1916 as if they took place on that day, interspersed with footage of the actual events. Eoin O’Suilleabháin played Patrick Pearse. It was a wonderful idea. One hopes they’ll come up with something equally innovative next year.
RTÉ built on this in 1980 when it gave us Strumpet City, a brilliant mini-series that more than did justice to James Plunkett’s towering re-creation of Dublin at the time of the 1913 Lock-Out. It wasn’t overtly about the Rising but in its evocative depiction of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events it scored magnificently. This is evidenced by the fact that people still talk about it warmly today. Peter O’Toole and Donal McCann may have been the ‘big names’ associated with it but David Kelly seemed to enter most people’s hearts more amiably as ‘Rashers’ Tierney.
In 1991 we had the RTÉ/BBC co-production The Treaty. It was directed by Jonathan Lewis. Some people saw it as dull and overly ‘talky’ but it was a faithful rendition of the negotiations that led to the formation of the Irish Free State. Brendan Gleeson gave a low-key ‘meat and potatoes’ performance as Michael Collins. This was decidedly at odds with Liam Neeson’s more flashy portrayal of the Big Fella a few years on in Neil Jordan’s blockbuster Michael Collins (1996).
I admired Jordan’s film. There was nothing wrong with Neeson’s performance but a post-film debate ensued throughout the nation where one was expected to align oneself to ‘Neeson or Gleeson’. Such a debate seemed to raise people’s blood pressure almost as much as the Civil War itself.
It shouldn’t have been an either/or issue. Jordan was working on a big budget for a major studio. To recoup its money it had to focus on some of the more popular (if not populist) factors in Collins’ life, like his romance with Kitty Kiernan, played with cutesy demureness by Julia Roberts.
This was obviously more ‘box office’ than the more paired-down parameters of The Treaty but the made-for-TV movie probably serves better as history. This is often the case when the small screen is pitted against the big one on matters of hard fact.
Barry McGovern was also a more effective De Valera than Jordan’s Alan Rickman. (Could he not have got an Irishman to play him?) And Lewis rightly had Arthur Griffith as the leader of the Irish delegation to London rather than Collins, as was suggested by Jordan’s film.
My own favourite film about 1916 and its torrid aftermath is The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Ken Loach’s incredibly powerful film. It featured a career-high performance by Cillian Murphy, a much under-rated actor. He played a medical graduate who trades in his scalpel for a gun as he watches the Black and Tans wreak havoc around his tightly-knit Cork community.
Murphy showed such sensitivity in the role – those fragile features helped – you really saw him as a doctor, unlike the James Cagney of Shake Hands with the Devil. It was this that drove the drama.
Loach has often been guilty of manipulative sloganeering. This film seemed to be going in the same direction because Murphy and his brother (Padraic Delaney) were obviously microcosms of the brother-against-brother political divide of Ireland at the time.
Delaney plumped for compromise and Murphy for an all-out socialist republic or nothing. What saved it from being a polemic on these opposing camps was the unalloyed passion of the cast and crew. The high-voltage production values made it into a nail-biting treatise on a country riven with fear and trembling.
A forthcoming American film on the events of this time, The Rising, also looks promising. It’s directed by Kevin McCann and focuses on Sean MacDiarmada, the polio-stricken insurgent who was the second signatory of the Proclamation after Tom Clarke. Other than that, details are sketchy. One thing we do know is that MacDiarmada was a hero to Michael Collins.
“He was God-given,” he rhapsodised once, “he didn’t seek glory as a personal investment but as a national one. If I had a quarter of his strength I would be satisfied. He was Ireland.”
What greater praise can one give anyone than that?