The Stage Irishman in Film

7/28/2019 The Stage Irishman in Film

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The Stage Irishman in Film The Stage Irishman in Film

Text analyses: The Quiet Man, Irish Jam, The Matchmaker, Holy Water

The Stage Irishman was probably the most long-lived of all the ethnic stereotypesof the new international theatre The Stage Irishman was usually confined to one or five

discernible characteristics: his garrulousness, his vainglorious boastfulness, his

unreliability, his unquenchable thirst and his equally untameable desire for quarrels andduels.

The Quiet Man

In late 1951, as his film The Quiet Man was being edited into final form, directorJohn Ford sent a cautiously optimistic telegram to his friend Lord Killanin in Dublin:

"The Quiet Man looks better and better. There is a vague possibility that even the Irish

will like it." Though The Quiet Man would be enormously popular in America, itsportrait of rural Irish life in the 1920s striking a chord of deep sympathetic response

among moviegoers of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, Ford's hopes for a similarresponse in Ireland were in vain.

In the short story The Quiet Man by Maurice Walsh there were two maincharacters. The two characters had very different characterization. Shawn Kelvin and

Liam O Grady are protagonist and antagonist in this story. They are separated by many

contrasts in their characters. The physical characteristics of the two men are verydifferent. Shawn Kelvin a young blithe lad in his twenties. Shawn is a little shorter than

an averaged sized man is.

The Quiet Man represents one example of how a director changes the work of anauthor when creating a movie for the general public. The Quiet Man, developed into a

full-length movie directed by John Ford in 1952, followed the story written by Maurice

Walsh in the 40s. Changing the story line, Ford created a movie that the public wouldwant to see.

The Quiet Man assumed symbolic importance for members of Ford's film family

not least because it incorporated so many of these rituals into its own story. Those who

have objected to the film as a hopelessly sentimentalized picture of Irish society--"atourist's vision of Ireland," as MacKillop says--have, for instance, been especially hard on

the music in the story, as though it portrayed the Irish as a happy-go-lucky people always

ready to break spontaneously into song no matter how terrible the tribulations of povertyand history.

Decades ago, film studios employed actors and directors to make movies for their

studios. So movies produced by a studio often included the same actors, actresses, and

directors. As a result, when casting The Quiet Man, the directors choices were limiteddue to the studio contracts with the actors and actresses.

While writing the script, Ford realized that the movie must accommodate the actors

in his studio. The main character, Shawn Kelvin, grew up in Ireland, moved to America,and then returned to Ireland according to the story. However, the only choice Ford had as

the main character was John Wayne. John Wayne could not effectively talk with an Irish

accent. Thus, Ford decided Shawn would grow up in America rather than Irelandpreventing the need for an Irish accent. This is one example of how Ford changed the
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story to accommodate the actors.

Ford wanted to entice people to see The Quiet Man as well as other movies

produced by the same studio. Thus, Ford inserted a twenty-minute fight scene involvingJohn Wayne, who was one of the studios main actors, hoping that people would enjoy

Waynes combative style, and would want to see other movies with John Wayne.

Additionally, Ford inserted hints of sexual involvement such as the broken bed sceneimplying that the newlyweds had a honeymoon the night before, but in reality this did not

happen. These are two examples of how Ford worked to get people to view the movie.

Ford improved the story by adding reality through stereotypes creating a believablefilm. Though the stereotypes he added would be unacceptable in a movie made today,

they were considered acceptable for some people in the 1950s. In the movie men could

beat their wives and claim them as their possessions. Women were shown as materialistic

and whiney lowering womens self esteem. Although Ford could have left these out, theyadded bits of humor and showed the treatment of women at that time.

The Quiet Man has a great deal in common with Shakespearean comedy. The

resemblance was remarked almost immediately by Lindsay Anderson, the English film

director who remains the most perceptive critic of Ford's work. Like Shakespeare,Anderson wrote to Ford in 1953, referring to both The Quiet Man and Ford's next

film The Sun Shines Bright, Ford had succeeded in creating a world that was "allharmony and reconciliation," exactly like "one of those late untidy' magical comedies--

Winter's Tale or Cymbeline."

So where a certain critical mentality is able to see in The Quiet Man and variousother Ford films only an irresponsible tendency to escapism--"the prettification of a lie,"

in David Thomson's deliberately hostile phrase--those convinced of Ford's cinematic

genius will instead see in The Quiet Man evidence of his enormous power to visualize, as

Northrop Frye says in speaking of the archetypal power of literature, "the world of desire,not as an escape from reality,' but as the genuine form that human life tries to imitate."

This is to see The Quiet Man, in short, as belonging to a comic tradition going back

through Shakespeare to Plautus in ancient Rome and Aristophanes in classical Greece,one that invokes the holiday or festive spirit of misrule, as Barber puts it, both as "release

for impulses which run counter to decency and decorum, and the clarification about limits

which comes from going beyond limits."The special claim of The Quiet Man, perhaps, produced against the massive

resistance of a Hollywood geared to the making of profits, incorporating the ethos and

rituals of Ford's film family into the very texture of its story, and lingering lovingly on its

image of Ireland as a green world so far magically exempt from the remorselesseconomic individualism of the America in which Sean Thornton killed an opponent for a

piece of the purse, is that it is a festival for our own time.

Ford successfully created a winning movie. Changing lines, enticing the public,and using stereotypes all contributed to its success. As a result of Fords changes The

Quiet Man is now a classic.

Irish Jam

Irish Jam was made after a true story about the real spirit of an Irish man who was living

in Cleveland. Its a true story about Danny Grene, a little boy who was orphan and who

was increased by his grandfather in a poor house from Waterloo Road. Since then Danny


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was no interested in school and he found other kind of activities. Then everything in

Cleveland was lead by the mafia. Every day after school Danny and Billy Mc Comber

must fight with few other Sicilian kids. After some years Danny was working atCuyahoga River, Cleveland Docks. He knows how to get out from troubles his friends.

He was a man who knew many things and who become a leader. But until there he had

some problems, he started from the bottom. His life wasnt clean all the time. He didmany things, that he wasnt so proud off. After a while he becomes a leader of mafia

from Cleveland. But because he knows how to take care of many things, many bad

peoples want him killed and they were killing his good friends. Because warriors dontfall. In his final day, he met some kids and, he told them to not be like him. Right after

this episode the car who was next to his was exploding and he was killed. His death was

beginning of collapse for the organized crime from Cleveland. Cleveland mafia was

never recovered.

The Matchmaker

The Matchmaker it is a farce in Four Acts. Thornton Wilder'sin his play of four-act"The Matchmaker" are telling the story of a widow who "brokers" marriages. Wilder

introduces Dolly Levi at the end of the first act. Before her appearance, Wilder firstdescribes the setting and time period. The novel is set in the 1880s. Horace Vandergelder

is a wealthy widower. Ambrose Kemper wants to marry Vandergelder's daughter, but

Kemper is too simple and practical to provide a good living for Ermengarde. Dolly enterswhen Vandergelder leaves for New York City. In the second part of the play, we see how

money influences the characters' short-term and long-term decisions. For example, Irene

Molloy will only agree to marry Vandergelder so his wealth can move her from a

"woman of low virtue" to someone with social standing. Her assistant, Minnie Fay,cautions her against marrying for any reason but love. It is Dolly Levi who convinces

Vandergelder to wait to marry Irene Molloy, explaining to him that she has a better

person in mind. Dolly Levi adds further conflict to the storyline when she reveals that thewoman she has in mind has decided to run off and get married to someone else. By the

end of "The Matchmaker," it is Dolly Levi who ends up receiving a marriage proposal

from Vandergelder. Janeane Garofolo goes to Ireland to check on her bosses familylineage. She ends up meeting an assortment of characters.

When the general-store clerk Cornelius Hackl, played with ebullient innocence by

Mike Shara, turns to his younger assistant and urges him, Get into your Sunday clothes,

Barnaby! Were going to New York, your ears perk up for the opening strains of the

jaunty song from the musical inspired by this bit of dialogue. And when the milliner Irene

Molloy (Laura Condlin) observes that women in New York will be wearing ribbonsdown their backs this summer, once again you may find yourself inwardly serenading the

stage with the reflective tune that accompanies this observation in the musical.

But soon enough the band in your head playing those irresistible Jerry Herman

tunes puts down its instruments as the natural delights of Wilders comedy assert

themselves. A throwback to classical forms even when it was new Brooks Atkinson,

in a jubilant review for The New York Times, frankly admitted that the woolly farce had


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by then been dismissed as obsolete The Matchmaker shakes off the air of quaint

antiquity that hovers at its edges when the ingenious mechanics of Wilders plot shift into

high gear: young men dive under tables and into closets, while flustered young womenattempting to hide them dither and stammer and scramble.

The plays history dovetails with that of the Stratford festival. It was at thesuggestion ofTyrone Guthrie, the festivals first artistic director, that Wilder decided to

take another look at The Merchant of Yonkers, a play that had flopped on Broadway in1938 under the heavy hand of Max Reinhardt. Guthrie invited Wilder to Stratford to work

on revisions, and Guthries production of the resulting play, rechristened The

Matchmaker, went on to debut at the Edinburgh Festival before taking London and then

New York by storm, with Ruth Gordon as the title character, Dolly Levi, giving aperformance described by Atkinson as epochally funny.

With the permission of the Wilder estate, Chris Abraham, the director of

Stratfords production, has interpolated some small bits from The Merchant of Yonkers

and Guthries prompt script into the published text. These minor emendations are not

particularly significant, though I did wonder if they extended the plays running time to

its detriment. A farce that stretches to 2 hours 40 minutes is in danger of collapsing like

an ill-cooked souffl.

Mr. Abrahams production builds slowly in the opening scene and wraps up in a

similarly slightly dilatory fashion, with a scene that will be entirely new to those who

know the material only from Hello, Dolly! But the production bustles along merrily for

most of the evening, as the romantic shenanigans orchestrated by Dolly (Seana

McKenna) arrange themselves into satisfying patterns culminating in two blissfully silly

scenes of knockabout comedy one in Irene Molloys hat shop and the other at the

Harmonia Gardens restaurant where all the plays characters find themselves

frantically at odds.

The amiably interfering Dolly, whose role in the play is less dominant than in the

musical, is given a pert, appealingly brisk interpretation by Ms. McKenna, a festival

mainstay often seen in classical roles. (Last season she played Richard III.) Its nice to

see Ms. McKenna at such ease in the frothier waters of farce. Tom McCamus, his bristles

of whiskers amusingly signifying his prickly personality, plays the man Dollys

commissioned to find a wife for: the wealthy shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder, a

widower determined to take a new wife without going to any great expenditure,

emotional or monetary.

As the 17-year-old shop apprentice Barnaby Tucker, Josh Epstein exudes an awe-

struck wonder as he finds himself tearing through the wild streets of New York City in
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the throes of the adventure he and Cornelius are determined to experience, if only just

this once in their lives. Their romantic counterparts Ms. Condlin as Irene and Andrea

Runge as her squealing assistant, Minnie Fay bring energy and spirit.

Geraint Wyn Davies, a veteran actor Im always happy to see at Stratford, playsMalachi Stack, a cheerful drifter looking for work who finds himself caught in the

confusion, and Mr. Davies infuses his scenes with sly doses of Irish wit. The other major

role excised from Hello, Dolly! is Miss Flora Van Huysen (Nora McLellan, hamming

merrily), the aunt of Horaces niece Ermengarde (Cara Ricketts). Floras home is where

the plays somewhat overelaborate final scene takes place.

Designed as an affectionate tribute to the classical models of farce, The

Matchmaker is nonetheless gently inflected with the warm humanity and wry wisdom

that characterized much of Wilders writing. Among Americas great playwrights he wasperhaps the most down to earth, the most keenly attuned to the humble but sustaining

pleasures of life, as well as its unavoidable sorrows. All the major characters in The

Matchmaker address the audience directly, and some of their reflections have

surprisingly sharp relevance in todays economic climate.

In Dollys intimate address to her dead husband, Ephraim Levi, in which she tells

him (and us) her reasons for remarrying, she observes that happiness requires a little

money. Not much, but a little, she says. The difference between a little money and no

money at all is enormous, and can shatter the world; and the difference between a littlemoney and an enormous amount of money is very slight, and that, also, can shatter the

world. Words worth pondering, Dolly, at a time when the uneven distribution of wealth

has become a major topic of global import.

Nor does Dolly alone bring us piquant observations on the matter of money. The

evenings standout performance comes from Mr. Shara as a movingly human but

boisterously funny Cornelius, who tells Barnaby in the plays first scene that they had

better grab their chance at adventure while they can, before they ossify into facsimiles of

their dour, money-obsessed employer:

Listen, everybody thinks when he gets rich hell be a different kind of rich person

from the rich people he sees around him. Later on he finds out theres only one kind of

rich person. And hes it.

Holy Water


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Henry Tuhoe is the quintessential twenty-first-century man. He has a vague,well-compensated job working for a multinational conglomerate-but everyone around

him is getting laid off as the company outsources everything it can to third-worldcountries. Henry has a beautiful wife-his college sweetheart-and an idyllic new home

in the leafy suburbs, complete with pool. But his wife won't let him touch her, eventhough she demanded he get a vasectomy; he's seriously overleveraged on the

mortgage; and no matter what chemicals he tries, the pool remains a corpselikeshade of ghastly green. Then Henry's boss offers him a choice: go to the tiny,magical, about-to-be-globalized Kingdom of Galado to oversee the launch of a new

customer-service call center for a boutique bottled water company the conglomerate

has just acquired, or lose the job with no severance. Henry takes the transfer, moreout of fecklessness than a sense of adventure. In Galado, a land both spiritual and

corrupt, Henry wrestles with first-world moral conundrums, the life he left behind,the attention of a steroid-abusing, megalomaniacal monarch, and a woman intent on

redeeming both his soul and her country. The result is a riveting piece of fiction ofand for our times, blackly satirical, moving, and profound.

That is not to say that Henry Tuhoe, the protagonist of James Othmers Holy

Water, bears any particular resemblance to, say, The Strangers Mersault. It is, rather, the

nature of Tuhoes journeya craftily interwoven mesh of culturally relevant mundanityand fairy-tale absurditythat recalls such sobering yet inspiring romps as Kurt

Vonneguts Timequake (1997).

Like Vonnegut, Othmer draws deeply on autobiographical experience. The

Putnam County author, a transformed New York creative advertising executive, describeshimself on his website as once known as the surly guy on the 5:19 to Croton Falls. He

creates Henry Tuhoe as a 32-year-old, relatively successful New York middle manager

for a large corporate conglomerate, increasingly at odds with his own version of theAmerican Dream.

Tuhoe has left his quasi-hip Upper West Side life for an exurb McMansion, anAudi A4, and a monthly Metro-North pass. His life is peppered with the spirituallychallenging vicissitudes of the suburban existence: the dissatisfying banality of forced

male bonding, the depressing chore of commuting, and the overwhelming and tedious

demands of home ownership. Tuhoe and his wife are drifting increasingly farther apart,their rift accelerated not just by the spiritually unfulfilled nature of their lives, but by the

confounding debate over filling that empty space through childrearing. The material

contrivances of upscale family life offer no solace to Tuhoe, whose sole prizedpossession is his extensive iTunes collection of contemporary pop music.

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The Stage Irishman in Film