The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 1
This is the first in a three part series of articles on the films and worldview of the Irish American auteur, John Martin Feeney - better known by the cognomen, John Ford.
“He was an intellect... a tough Irish intellect. I don't think there can be anything worse than that.” — Lee Marvin
Introduction:
There is a good case to be made that the two most influential American artists of the twentieth century were Eugene O'Neill and John Martin Feeney (known to history as John Ford). The former was a playwright of Irish Catholic descent who all but invented serious American theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, before producing a series of climactic masterworks in his declining years. Long Day's Journey into Night, the autobiographical account of an Irish-American family torn apart by personal demons, remains perhaps his most enduring achievement.
The latter, John Martin Feeney, was born in Cape Elizabeth in Maine to parents from Spiddal and Inis Mór. He survived as a director in Hollywood for over fifty years and was regarded by many of his peers (and some of the giants of World Cinema) as the great poet of moving pictures.
“The one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I'm Irish,” O'Neill once told his son. And the same was evidently true of Feeney, whose ethnic identity surfaced again and again throughout his work. He told a friend in Ireland: “Galway is in my blood and the only place I have found peace.”
To find a bridge between these two important contemporaries, one only has to look to The Long Voyage Home (1939) which is Feeney and screenwriter Dudley Nichol's adaptation of three O'Neill plays about sailors on a merchant navy vessel. Infused with O'Neill's pessimism and Feeney's populism, it is one of the quintessential Irish-American works of art.
The following three articles focus on the second of these great Irish-Americans, somewhat neglected nowadays in Ireland perhaps outside of film institutes. They delve into Feeney as an Irish Catholic filmmaker, his relationship to his ethnic religious identity, his mercurial politics and the contradictions that underpin his popular vision of Americana. He is regarded by some as a pioneering “progressive”, by others as a racist “reactionary”, but it might help more to think of him beyond these cliches of left and right politics simply as a poet of dispossession. Feeney's films are full of longing for a time that perhaps never was and a world that perhaps never shall be.
Part I: Feeney and Ireland – A Lost Opportunity?
As Irish people there is a curtain that lies between John Martin Feeney and ourselves. That is the curtain that lies between the native born and the diaspora. For all of the closeness of ties there remains too often some unbridgeable gap characterised by lack of charity or abundant ill-will. We are the people most likely to understand Feeney but also the ones most likely to reject him. It is a relationship marked by the rupture of identity and the trauma that ensues thereof. The trauma is on both sides, the limb torn from the body and the body torn from the limb. If Feeney is a poet of dispossession, then that is where it begins. First and foremost, he is dispossessed by the fact of being born in America, amputated from his Mother Country.
Getting Beyond The Quiet Man
Feeney's reputation in Ireland is unfortunately clouded by what sometimes seem caricatured depictions of his ancestral homeland, most notably in The Informer (1935), The Quiet Man (1951), and to a lesser extent The Rising of the Moon (1957). In some cases these films are marred by the studio-imposed necessity of using non-Irish actors (The Informer in particular) and by Feeney's own love of absurd caricature and broad comedy. A less commented on factor may be the influence of the Abbey Players who he often uses in these films, Ireland at the time lacking experienced screen actors. Critics such as Joseph McBride have pointed out that the “time honoured theatrical tradition, that of Synge, Yeats, O'Casey, and Lady Gregory of the Abbey theatre” has a lot to do with how Feeney represents Ireland. As such the blame (or credit) for The Quiet Man may lie in Anglo-Irish theatrical conventions coming out of Dublin rather than simply Irish-American rose tinted glasses. In any case, Irish people have never really been sure how to take some of these screen antics and the result is that the greatest filmmaker of Irish blood is probably more respected in France or Japan than in the country he longed to have been born in.
One of the great failures of the Irish State in its early decades was the lack of a proper indigenous film industry (a resource of national strategic importance one might have thought) which meant there was insufficient native corrective to foreign perceptions of Ireland. What a difference it would have made to have an Irish Bergman or Fellini churning out homegrown art films on a yearly basis through the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps Ireland did produce such a man but he was not born on this side of the Atlantic. He was born in Cumberland County in Maine. And the Irish were to be a footnote (a significant footnote admittedly) to his greater subject, the United States of America.
To many Irish people the name John Ford means one film. And that one film is where the discussion ends. The Quiet Man (however good one concedes it is) can never be more than a guilty pleasure for Irish audiences. A victim of its own immense success, it has loomed over Irish cinema like an emerald green monolith. In fact much of subsequent Irish cinema has been a direct reaction and an ongoing attempted corrective. Its legacy is even economic having done more to create the Irish tourism industry than probably anything else in the twentieth century and more to influence perceptions of Ireland abroad than probably any homegrown media product before or since. Its legacy is ambivalent but unlike The Informer (where the second-hand German expressionism now looks dated) it remains very entertaining and visually effective.
The Quiet Man is widely understood as a piece of Irish-American escapism. In 1953 Feeney was fifty-eight years old. He had been through the Second World War. He was increasingly disillusioned with the world, with the youth of America, with the speed of change and with the direction of the country. The Quiet Man was simply his retreat into a fantasy Ireland. A world of solid values and deep traditions, where men were men and women were women and life was as it had always been. You either surrender to his fantasy or you reject it. There is no middle ground.
The Rising of the Moon and the Failure to Launch of Irish Cinema
The Rising of the Moon, made several years later, benefited from a cast of wholly Irish actors and the fact it was made entirely in Ireland. This was a genuine attempt to kick-start a native film industry through a company called Four Provinces Productions, a venture of Feeney's associate in Ireland, Michael Morris (Lord Killanin).
Banned at the time in Belfast for fear it might “incite latent revolutionary sentiment” (Joseph McBride), the film deals with three mainly lighthearted stories, shot on locations in Galway and in Clare. The second is a slapstick piece filmed at a train station in Kilkee. The result does not appear to have been well received, at least by the Great and Good of Irish society, on account of its painting Ireland once more as backwards and anti-modern. This was at a time when the State was pivoting to foreign direct investment as a means of reinventing the Irish economy. A member of Limerick County Council, D.P. Walsh actually tried to get the film pulled from worldwide distribution. Their attitude now seems somewhat unfair because the film is very well directed and has many interesting elements. If nothing else Feeney showed how a low budget production, shooting quickly and efficiently could produce professional results in the rural West of Ireland, decades before Bob Quinn made the seminal Poitín (1978). Imagine if this work had been built upon, instead of being ridiculed out of hand.
It is a small film full of small but deft touches. Viewers shouldn't be put off by the somewhat cheesy intros to each section, provided by Tyrone Power and added by Killanin to make the film more commercial. The heart is in the stories themselves, slight in terms of plot, but rich in atmosphere and local charm. Feeney shows how the tasteful use of folk music can elevate small moments into highlights (this is one of his trademarks) as when Ceril Cusack looks from the ruined castle built by the fearsome O'Flahertys to the humble cottage where a proud descendant, played by Noel Purcell, dwells in poverty. “Well it's not the castle that makes the king,” Cusack remarks in a beautifully observed moment. Feeney's specialty is the “grace note.” The pieces of incidental magic, tangential to plot, which he weaves into his cinematic worlds. Another example is the lingering close up on Denis O'Dea's RIC constable as he realises a notorious IRA fugitive is within his grasp. We hear the Rising of the Moon being sung hauntingly in the distance as he silently makes up his mind to put Ireland before the £500 reward and let the man escape. It is moments like this that the loss of a film industry in those early decades of the Irish State denied to us.
Where is Our Irish Nationalist Cinema?
The most disappointing part of Feeney's Irish films is the lack of satisfying engagement with the topic of Irish nationalism despite Feeney's financial support for the IRA in the 1920s. The Informer although based on a fine Liam O'Flaherty novel is ultimately a dour subject for film and a story that focuses morbidly on a traitor. His attempt to adapt The Plough and the Stars in 1937 was badly mangled by the studio and is basically unwatchable. Even had it been different, one might query the reliance on source material like Séan O'Casey which, for all its literary reputation, has a bitter, revisionist anti-Catholic flavour. It is happy to linger on working class Catholics for colour and realism but scornful of any actual Catholic nationalist vanguard. O'Casey's legacy is in some regards even more ambivalent than The Quiet Man which for all its kitsch and blarney is a distinctly upbeat view of Ireland as distinct from the anti-clerical, anti-nationalist misery-porn, that makes up much of literary and media output in the decades since.
A more serious objection to The Quiet Man and to Feeney's Irish films in general is that the only Ireland is a plebeian Ireland. Ireland is forever defined as a race whose political and cultural elites have been exiled or liquidated.
The historical significance of organisations like the IRB and the Irish Volunteers, etc. is the attempt to reconstitute a native elite and raise the people out of their servitude. But this is rarely treated with the dignity or respect it deserves. It is either deconstructed (O’Casey) or otherwise de-emphasised. Hence we have rarely been treated to stirring depictions of great Irishmen of history. Martin Cahill “The General” has had more films made about him than Brian Ború or Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill.
It may seem ironic that Ireland had (for so long) no cinema industry of its own and yet through Feeney it produced perhaps the most influential filmmaker of the twentieth century. For example, Feeney did more than probably anyone else to define the Western film genre and as a result of this he helped define America to the world. Joseph Stalin's favourite film was My Darling Clementine (1946). The famous Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein said that Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) was the film he wished he had made.
The British film historian Kevin Brownlow liked to claim that Ireland in fact did have a film industry of its own and that it was called Hollywood. He referred in particular to the early decades of American cinema and to the many people of Irish descent who participated in creating it. It is unfortunate (and perhaps worthy of further investigation) that the Irish did not conquer the financial/ producing side of Hollywood. Feeney's older brother Francis tried and failed to set up his own studio in the 1920s. The influence of Irish Catholics (and the rooted qualities they brought with them) waned perceptively as the decades went on. It seems significant that the second coming of American cinema (the 1970s) was accompanied by new blood from mainly Italian Catholics like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who came out of still strong ethnic communities like New York's Little Italy. The direct relation to a rooted traditional milieu (even in its vanishing moments) is a resource of immense benefit to the artist. But once the links to the rooted past are sundered, cinema becomes increasingly self-referential.
Irish cinema of the last two decades is a cinema that has become “viable” in an era which is postmodern and self-referential. Irish cinema is a cinema without a childhood. Only an adolescence. Irish actors are headhunted from abroad because they still have a rooted sense of identity in their eyes, but they are plucked from a world out a joint, a “Little Italy” about to disappear.
What would a proper Irish cinema in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s have been? Would it have been too much to ask for a serious treatment of the 1916 Rising from the point of view of the Irish Volunteers? One which visualised the events, not from an Anglo-revisionist view as a foolhardy fiasco but as an important transformative event, which among other things added a chapter of heroism to the annals of Irish history. Perhaps a film representation in which the faith, piety and sincerity of the leaders was honoured (dare we say respected) and the extent to which their sacrifice succeeded was actually acknowledged. The impression many casual viewers took from the television dramatisation of the Rising produced by RTÉ in 2016 entitled Rebellion was that the whole affair of Easter Week was just a futile waste.
It seems like any other country would have found a way to dramatise these events as they deserved to be dramatised. Whether Feeney would have been the man to helm such a film is uncertain. It probably would have required a homegrown Irish-born genius. Nonetheless, Feeney established a tradition of cinematic poetry, steeped in Irish race-memory, which his ancestral homeland ought to have embraced.