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Alfred Hitchcock enjoys a challenge, long before Rope here's people talking in a room transfigured by a keen camera. An ascending crane from the street orator (Barry Fitzgerald) to the top of a lamp post gives "a wide awake Ireland," the rattle of machine-gun fire curtails the speech, a recurring punctuation. The Boyle living room sets the literal stage, matriarch Juno (Sara Allgood) and "Captain" Jack (Edward Chapman) plus jokes and songs and tragedy from the Sean O'Casey play. Prognosticators and procrastinators, theosophists and yogis, the harried wife and the sea salt who wonders about the moon and the stars, cf. Amarcord. Sudden fortune magnifies pervasive strife, a slow forward track in the midst of a celebration locates the maimed son (John Laurie) by the fireplace alone and haunted. (A reverse track from the horn of a gramophone inaugurates the next act.) "Ah, him that goes a-borrowin', goes a sorrowin'." A Dublin Abbey Theatre recording, faithfully rendered yet studded with bits as experimental as anything in Blackmail: A view of the daughter (Kathleen O'Regan) seduced and abandoned evokes George Frederic Watts' portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron, a dollop of whispered exposition is visualized as mouths and ears alternating in Dalíesque close-up. The frying pan underneath the bed, off-screen lamentations and votive lights, Madonna figurine and trench coat-clad IRA agent in rapid succession. "A darlin' poem, a darlin' poem!" Allgood's gaze of pensive weariness in the hollowed-out home embodies the closing cry, "hearts o' stone," "hearts o' flesh." (Loach in The Wind That Shakes the Barley has a distinct memory of it.) With Sidney Morgan, Maire O'Neill, John Longden, Dennis Wyndham, and Fred Schwartz. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |