The Quare Fellow

This is certainly a compelling movie. The acting is fine to very good. Sylvia Syms is especially good. I think she may be a little miscast: Her elegant manner comes through even in a cat fight.

I guess it was an admirable undertaking. And the basic theme is still there: Hanging is a pretty brutal thing for civilized men to do, even in the name of justice.

But the wit of the original play is mostly lost. The story is opened up for the movie. That happened a lot, especially in those times. But in making it more cinematic, its original punch was lost.

A major character is either left out or greatly toned-down. What's left is a 1930s Warner Brother prison movie transposed to the UK. Those movies were almost always at least entertaining and were often powerful. This is entertaining and a little powerful. But I'm not sure it's Brendan Behan.

"The Quare Fellow" is a film about prisons--particularly focusing on capital punishment. It's all told from the viewpoint of a new prison guard (Patrick McGoohan) who has learned that his new job will include assisting in the executions. At first, this doesn't seem to bother him, as he sees his job as a public service and the men being killed had earned their fate. However, after meeting the wife of the man he's about to execute, doubts enter his mind--especially since her actions led to her husband committing murder.

The film is clearly anti-death penalty and shows the prison guards pretty uniformly despising it. Whether this is true in reality, I have no idea but the idea is interesting. The story is also told in a nice straight-forward manner--without a lot of melodrama and told almost documentary style. However, the film has a big weakness--you never really connect with the condemned nor is there much of a sense that you should feel sorry for the guy. Yes, no one likes capital punishment but this particularly case just doesn't seem all that compelling. As a result, it's a film that fails to connect on an emotional level and loses some of its impact as a result. A decent film but no more....and there are certainly better anti death penalty films.

By the way, the title apparently is a reference to the condemned man--called 'quare fellows' in the Irish prison system.

The Quare Fellow is directed by Arthur Dreifuss who along with Jacqueline Sundstrom co-adapts the screenplay from the Brendan Behan play. It stars Patrick McGoohan, Sylvia Syms, Walter Macken and Dermot Kelly. Music is by Alexander Faris and cinematography by Peter Hennessy.

Thomas Crimmin (McGoohan) begins new employment at a Dublin jail firmly believing in the benefits of the death penalty. Not everyone of his colleagues feels the same, though, and as Crimmin works through his time and gets close to the wife of a condemned man, his beliefs are splintered.

The play by all accounts was awash with humour, something which this filmic version considerably lacks. Dreifuss prefers to make the film bleak, both in surroundings and via the characterisations. The prison is perpetually cold and grey, smiles are hard to find within these walls, cynicism and fatalism drip from the wrought iron doors, and of course moral compasses are all over the place. This doesn't make it a bad film, not a bit of it, it's a tough drama acted superbly, with some brains and brawn injected into the script. Yet it ultimately plays its hand as a straight forward anti-capital punishment peace, missing opportunities to expand upon hinted at themes, particularly where Syms' fraught wife character is concerned. Still, it's a must for McGoohan and Syms fans and for those who like gritty pics set in prisons. 6.5/10

The title 'translates' to "The Condemned Man," by the way. As a kid, I saw this movie soon after its U.S. release; so after almost 40 years, I remember little except that (1)it was visually unlike any movie I'd seen; (2)I enjoyed it very much, especially (3)Patrick MacGoohan's performance. I hope to hunt this one down, see it again, and return here to relate more specifics.

This is a grim realistic drama of life and death at a prison in Ireland, where we meet the prisoners and their warders and a wife of one of the prisoners, with also priceless scenes from a nearby pub, which actually offers the best scenes of the film - the prison, like all prisons, isn't quite cheerful. But you get into the minds of the prison warders, and that is psychologically very interesting, as none of them is sadistic or cruel at all. On the contrary, executions are the worst thing they know, and the action of the film is from the times before executions were cancelled in England. Sylvia Syms and Patrick McGoohan both make very sensitive parts, and especially Sylvia Syms' performance is outstanding. It's a drama growing more exciting the longer it lasts, and the outcome isn't very funny, but there is actually nothing else to do.