Ireland



CINEMA AND THE IRISH DIASPORA

The extraordinarily high levels of emigration from Ireland to the United States during the Irish famine years of the late 1840s meant that the Irish and Irish-Americans made up a significant percentage of early American cinema audiences, especially in the eastern cities, where they tended to congregate. During the early silent era film producers pandered to these audiences with sentimental tales and romantic adventures set in Irish-American communities or in Ireland. These early two- and three-reel films attracted a range of Irish and Irish-American actors, who perfected the stereotypes that defined the cinematic image of the Irish for decades. Although many of these films are now lost, their titles remain to evoke the world of Irish ethnic comedies—Biograph's "Hooligan" one-reelers from 1903, longer comedies and dramas like those made by the Kalem Film Company between 1908 and 1912, and hundreds of films that featured the words "Ireland" or "Irish" in their titles from the 1910s. A randomly chosen selection of such titles includes The Irish Boy (1910) and The Lad from Old Ireland (1910), All for Old Ireland (1915), A Wild Irish Rose (1915), The Irishman's Flea (1920), Luck of the Irish (1920) or the "Cohens and the Kellys" cycle (1920s), the last of which was aimed simultaneously at two ethnic audiences. These films were peopled by amiable drunks and aggressive brawlers, corrupt politicos and honest but dumb cops, Catholic priests and angelic nuns, long-suffering mothers, feisty colleens, and vulnerable, naïve maidens. Although established in the very earliest days of silent cinema, these stereotypical characters continued to populate American genre cinema throughout the twentieth century. They were played by a range of character actors and stars who were either native-born Irish, such as Colleen Moore (1900–1988), Maureen O'Hara (b. 1920), Barry Fitzgerald (1888–1961), Peter O'Toole (b. 1932), Richard Harris (1930–2002), Liam Neeson (b. 1952), Pierce Brosnan (b. 1953), and Colin Farrell (b. 1976), or had an Irish ancestry upon which to draw when necessary: James Cagney (1899–1986), Victor McLaglen (1883–1959), Spencer Tracy (1900–1967), Anthony Quinn (1915–2001), and Errol Flynn (1909–1959).

The Irish diaspora also provided some influential pioneers of American film. In the formative years of Hollywood, for example, Irish-born director Rex Ingram (1892–1950) was a particularly noted stylist who made Rudolph Valentino a star with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Herbert Brenon (1880–1958) was one of the most critically acclaimed of silent film directors, although his career foundered with the advent of sound. The most famous and most enduring of the early pioneers was a second-generation Irish-American, John Ford (1894–1973). Ford was one of the great genre directors of Hollywood who lived his Irishness openly in life as well as on the screen. He peopled his westerns and other non-Irish films with many of the stereotypical characters that early cinema had established. More than anyone, he helped to prolong a romantic Irish-American sense of identity, of which the ultimate expression is The Quiet Man , in which he manages the not inconsiderable achievement of both celebrating and gently undermining the outrageous stereotypes of Ireland and the Irish.

The considerable presence of the Irish in early audiences resulted in another historically important development for American cinema. In 1910, the Kalem Film Company became the first American company to shoot on location outside of the United States when it made The Lad from Old Ireland in Killarney. The film was produced and directed by Irish-Canadian Sidney Olcott (1873–1949), who recognized the commercial value of showing authentic Irish locations to a nostalgic and homesick audience in the United States. He brought Kalem back to Ireland for two more summer visits in 1911 and 1912, making a range of one- and two-reel films based on old Irish melodramas or depicting historical moments in Ireland's long nationalist struggle against Britain. These fictional films made in Ireland established the use of Ireland as a theme and a location for filmmaking by American and British producers, while little effort was made to develop indigenous production.



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