Hornpipe Magazine Irish themed film reviews Vol. 4

Volume 4, Issue 6

O'Toole politely blows off bogus Oscar

What an altogether delightful fellow is actor Peter O'Toole for telling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences snobs to stuff their paltry offer of an honorary Oscar in their baby bean sprouts by sending a hand-written tome to the Academy exclaiming his fascination with their offer but reminding them he is "still in the game."

O'Toole, nominated seven times for an Oscar for his work in films as diverse as the historical epic Lawrence of Arabia and the nostalgic comedy My Favorite Year, was due to receive the award during the 75th annual Academy Awards ceremony March 23rd. O'Toole told the Academy he doesn't want it now saying he was "enchanted" by the group's gesture, but said that since he is "still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright, would the Academy please defer the honor until I am 80?"

Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said it was time for O'Toole to get an Oscar. In his letter O'Toole politely ignored the fact that he should have been Oscared as long ago as 30 years when he chewed up the screen as TE Lawrence...

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Volume 4, Issue 6

NY Irish Arts Center's First Winter Film Festival

A love Divided - The dramatic love story of a marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant in 1950's Ireland.

Sunday - A dramatization of events surrounding the 1972 'Bloody Sunday' massacre in Derry, N. Ireland.

Three Brothers - This documentary tells a lyrical story of emigration and return.

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Volume 4, Issue 6

Gangs of New York highlights history — poverty and violence dominate political change

Martin Scorcese's Gangs of New York is an epic film, while lamely made, tells the story of how the Irish rose from abject poverty and murderous violence to dominate the political landscape in New York and the rest of the nation in less than a century.

Gangs portrayal of the violence that attended the struggles of the 19th century's Rabbits, Plug Uglies and other New York Irish gangs may insult and gall many Irish-Americans with a more sanitized version of the people's history, it is the most accurate part of the staging of this untold saga of the American underbelly.

Moreover, the dominance of Irish gangs in New York and other major cities' crime histories is a tale often swept under the rug by those who are ashamed of their family's participation in it at various stages including right up into the 1980's when the "Westies" Irish gang chief Jimmy Burke murdered almost all his confederates in the famed Lufthansa heist of $6 million in cash and jewels...

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Volume 4, Issue 5

Bloody Sunday

Director, Paul Greengrass
James Nesbitt

While it is likely that the movie "Bloody Sunday" will show only in art houses before it goes to video, it is a document that anyone concerned with Irish history and affairs should view.

Director Paul Greengrass has created a tour de force of historical re-enactment in this 107 - minute examination of the events of January 30, 1972 in Northern Ireland when English paratroopers opened fire on a march of peaceful Catholics demonstrating for their civil rights and killed 13 people.

James Nesbitt (seen in Waking Ned Devine) plays Ivan Cooper, a Catholic activist committed to resisting joint oppression by the Northern Ireland and British governments. It is Cooper who is the focus of the story as he sets about quietly recruiting Catholics to join him in the ill-fated match. Snatches of whispered conversation, snapshots of rooftop gun emplacements, constant background noise and warnings from the radio illustrates the tension that permeated a nation then as it does now and the risk involved in the march.

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Volume 4, Issue 4

The Deadly Companions

Maureen O'Hara, Brian Keith

What's so special about a 40-year old western with Maureen O'Hara? After all, she made several lucrative horse operas with John Wayne that reprised their Quiet Man face off. Each of those did her acting reputation no good and cemented her film image as the archetypal Irish harridan with the face of an angel and sex appeal without end.

There are several aspects of The Deadly Companions that makes this film interesting four decades later. First, the film was produced by O'Hara's brother, Charles FitzSimons. That surely gave the actress a greater ability to affect the writing by the prolific A.S. Fleishman. The screenplay was ahead of its time with O'Hara as a powerful woman reeling from the murder of her husband on the way to a new life in the west. Pregnant and reviled by the women in the town as a whore, O'Hara is relegated to dance-hall work to care for the son she bore by her dead husband. Mother and child are completely ostracized.

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Volume 4, Issue 3

Road to perdition

Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty)
Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law

The much talked about well-crafted mob movie that explores the ties between fathers and sons has Irish roots in depression-era America. Opening ceili scenes of an Irish wake in a mid-west town outside of Chicago may excite dancers but that is all you will see in this dark movie where work ethic was traded for devilish easy money.

This movie supports earlier writings in HORNPIPE on the brutality and clannish, self destructive nature of the Irish mob as glorified in Mob-Americana. Road to Perdition stars Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, a quiet hit man who is duty bound to Mafia boss John Ronney (Paul Newman). Behind the violent and deceiving story of prohibition booze peddling, prostitution, murder,

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For much of the past century, the task of representing Ireland to the world's cinema goers lay in the hands of foreign filmmakers. Images of thatched cottages and wayward village folk dominated the cinema obscuring the real Ireland. However, in more recent years, indigenous Irish filmmakers have risen to the challenge of creating a new and more authentic representation of Ireland on screen. Now in its fourth year, The Boston Irish Film Festival showcases the very best of this new cinema.

Ireland has produced a prodigious amount of clever poets, wits, satirists, masters of the double entendre, and raconteurs. Being able to drop a pithy bon mot in almost any company is practically a genetic trait among some clans of the Irish. No one can doubt this when reading Swift or Shaw but no Irish wit has been as reviled, beloved and quoted as Oscar Wilde.

The 1998 Tri-Star production of Oscar Wilde gives the moviegoer a clear look inside the mores and cultural biases of 19th century England and Ireland as it recounts the flamingly homosexual Wilde's escapades and writings both in Europe and in the US.

The opening scene has Wilde touring the depths of a Colorado mine in the company of a group of teenage miners and would seem to set the stage for a tale of his wit with small helpings of debauchery. As the plot soon shows, however, the writer has chosen to focus on Wilde's conflicted love for his primary male friend and his love for his long-suffering wife and children who have borne the brunt of his drinking, gambling and sexual philandering.

As much as the formidable talents of Stephen Fry (familiar to American PBS viewers as Jeeves of the P.G.Wodehouse tales) attempt to portray Wilde as a man bullied by his mother and social strictures, the story contains enough episodes of Wilde's self-indulgent petulance to largely erase audience sympathy for him.