Young Cassidy

YOUNG CASSIDY

Listed as a John Ford Film, with Jack Cardiff taking over as director, Young Cassidy is less about the formative writing career and more about the sex life of Sean O’Casey, Ireland’s most politically incorrect playwright. Considered persona non grata because of his Communist leanings, O’Casey’s plays caused violent eruptions in theatres—ostensibly because of his proletariat views but most probably because they also contained religious mockery, social degradation and bawdy language. He was maligned even by those who produced and acted in his works, which include The Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock, Purple Dust, Red Roses for Me and The Star Turns Red. The movie, however, commandeers Communism by inserting Ireland’s national uprising against the Brits as cause for O’Casey’s people-against-Capitalism Naturalism. (O’Casey’s polemics, which sprung from his poverty-laden upbringing, swelled dramatically during those bloodbath riots.) In omitting the core of O’Casey’s themes, the moviemakers have allowed his lack of success to be confusing; if you don’t have prior knowledge of the Communist controversies, you can’t make full sense of what all the commotion is about when his second play premieres and patrons start shouting and throwing cabbage onto the stage. (The irony of the hypocrisy is altogether missed—the very attendees and critics attacking the labor-class playwright were likely the same ones cheering on Shaw.) There’s a poor, underdeveloped sequence involving O’Casey—played by Rod Taylor—having his first book published; we’re barely aware he was writing a nonfiction tome, but the relationship between him and his publisher is the stone cold issuance of a check for 15 pounds; Rod’s writer has more passion for trying to get his check cashed than for the subjects he writes about. (We never find out if the book sold much, or what kind of reaction it got, or understand the shift from essay-like newspaper sermons to playwriting.) It’s the other subject of Young Cassidy—the lusty, robust sexuality of the author—taking precedence. In this mode, Rod is attractively fleshy and self-confidant, a babe magnet whose first conquest is Julie Christie as whore Daisy who says to him provocatively, “Shall I mend your trousers?” His true love is Maggie Smith’s Nora, a bookstore proprietress who catches him attempting to steal books he can’t afford to purchase. How could he not fall in love with her when she in turn sends the books to him as a gift? Overall, and despite the directors’ attempts to avoid the agitating politics of the plays, this is Rod’s most satisfying hour. The ending doesn’t clarify O’Casey’s exile from Ireland was voluntary, not compulsory. And apparently just for the hell of it, the moviemakers throw in a rather bizarre Tom Jonesian harpsichord interlude. With Michael Redgrave as Yeats, Edith Evans, Flora Robson. Screenplay by John Whiting, adapting O’Casey’s Mirror in My House.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com