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Volume 5, Issue 6
The Informer
Star: Victor McLaglen
Director: John Ford
1935
Victor McLaglen served in World War I as a captain with the Irish Fusiliers and as provost marshal of Baghdad. In the early 1920s he broke into films and soon moved to Hollywood, where he got lead and supporting roles; his basic screen persona was that of a large, brutish, but soft-hearted man of action.
He made the transition from silent films to talkies and worked all his days. He is best known to Americans for his role as the boasting, battling brother-in-law in the classic Quiet Man.
In John Ford's 1935 The Informer, McLaglen gave an Oscar-winning portrayal of the benighted Gypo Nolan of Liam Flaherty's novel. In 1922 Dublin, Nolan, who's been exiled by his IRA cell for refusing an assignment to kill a man, is ridiculed for his perennial poverty by his prostitute girlfriend who wants badly for them to immigrate to the US.
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Volume 5, Issue 5
The Brothers McMullen
Director / Lead role: Ed Burns
The Brothers McMullen won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival before it was put into wide release. It is an excellent low-budget independent film that was taken as a treatise on modern family life by most viewers, but was at its essence a look at what it means to be an Irish American in a family that has retained much of its original value structure from its immigrant ancestors.
Director and star Edward Burns is a good Irish-Catholic boy who has drawn on his own experiences in telling this tale of the three struggling McMullen brothers. The telling is also the telling of how Irish Americans, mainly on the east coast or in large Midwestern cities, have come to grips with trying to live up to moral and familial standards that are at odds with the mores of the rest of the world and made more complicated by the moment to moment changes in societal dynamics.
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Volume 5, Issue 4
The Boxer
Daniel Day-Lewis
Director: Jim Sheridan, 1997
Director Sheridan, one of Ireland's most prolific producers of quality film, once again casts his tight lens on the complexities and currents that the Troubles inflict upon simple lives and seem so inescapable for even those with no dog in the fight.
The story focuses on Danny Flynn (Daniel Day-Lewis), a promising boxer who had been imprisoned at age 18 for associating with IRA terrorists. After serving a 14 year sentence, he returns to his Belfast neighborhood at a time when local IRA leader Joe Hamill (Brian Cox) is attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the British.
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Volume 5, Issue 3
Colin Farrell, a most excellent Irish export
Ireland's leading exports have always been the components of culture — authors, playwrights, poets, actors, singers, musicians — they have made their mark on the world, but few quite as quickly as Colin Farrell star of cinema hits such as S.W.A.T., Dare-devil, Phone Booth, Minority Report, and Hart's War.
Farrell, son of Irish football star, Eamon Farrell, dropped out of Dublin's Gaiety Drama School in 1996 and a few months later auditioned for the part of Danny Byrne in the internationally-acclaimed television series Ballykissangel.
The 25-year-old started in entertainment by being forced into dancing lessons by his mother, Rita, once his brother, Eamon, Jr., started them. His brother also went to acting school and urged it on Colin who had been an average student in school. The acting bug bit Farrell and his meteoric rise to the A-list of Hollywood's young actors took off.
From his first US film, Tigerland, other actors and directors have been impressed with his craft and passion, allowing him to work with luminaries such as Kevin Spacey, Al Pacinco, Samuel L. Jackson, Steven Spielberg and Joel Schumacher.
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Volume 5, Issue 2
The Butcher Boy
Director: Neil Jordan
Staring: Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eamonn Owens, Milo O'Shea and Sinead O'Connor.
Any film called The Butcher Boy that features a cameos by chanteuse Sinead O'Connor must contain some comedic weirdness. Weirdness aplenty, but precious little comedy in Neil Jordan's adaptation of Patrick McCabe's novel.
This is a slowly drawn tale of adolescent isolation resulting in horrifying psychological and physical violence. It's 1962 in a small Irish village where Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) is a 12-year-old boy whose cheerful manner hides untold emotional disturbance.
Francie lives on a diet of comic books and TV as his mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) is chronically depressed and his father (Stephen Rea) is a raging alcoholic. Francie's nemesis, and neighbor Mrs. Nugent (played with great vehemence by Fiona Shaw) is always telling Francie that he and his family are pigs. Francie determines to become a pig after his mother commits suicide and his father blames Francie.
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Volume 5, Issue 1
Boston Irish Film Festival: Celebrating Ireland and the Irish on screen
HORNPIPE first introduced the Boston Irish Film Festival to our readers in the spring of 2000. Today the Fifth Annual Boston International Irish Film Festival's venues are the Brattle Theatre, The Harvard Film Archive, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Adding to their schedule this year are their own BIFF Awards.
BEST FEATURE NARRATIVE - BOXED
Directed by Marion Comer
Ireland / UK 2002, 35mm, color, 80 min.
With Tom Jordan Murphy, Jim Norton, Catherine Cusack, Brendan Mackey
Based on several real-life accounts, this searing drama explores the ambiguous role of the Catholic Church in the North's political struggle for freedom. Father Brendan (Tom Jordan Murphy) is an idealistic young priest called to an abandoned house to hear the last confession of a suspected informer awaiting execution by the IRA. Refusing to let the man be murdered, Brendan sets in motion a chain of events that will expose not only the Church's collusion with terrorists but the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Catholic Nationalism. Writer/Director Marion Comer has created a highly complex, emotionally charged film, effortlessly building tension to a stunning, and all to inevitable, climax.
Other films reviewed in this article include:
BEST DOCUMENTARY — DARKROOM
Directed by Ian Thuillier, Ireland, 2002, video, color, 52 min.
BEST SHORT/ANIMATION — (FROM DARKNESS)
2003 Shorts Program
Directed by Various, Ireland 2002, video, color & b/w, 81 min
DIRECTOR'S CHOICE AWARD — PHOTOS TO SEND
Directed by Dierdre Lynch, 2001, video, color 88 min
PUCKOON
Directed by Terence Ryan
Ireland/UK 2002, 35 mm, color, 82 min,
with Sean Hughes, Elliot Gould, John Lynch, Richard Attenborough, David Kelly
IN AMERICA
Directed by Jim Sheridan
IRE / US 2002, 35mm, color, 103 min.
With Samantha Morton, Paddy Considine, Djimon Hounsou
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Irish Dance, Music, Film, and Culture
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