Juno and the Paycock

Great film! Hitchcock's second sound feature is a well done film though it isn't Hitch's usual genre. Hitch points his religion (which was Catholic) out many times in this film that it almost becomes the central theme. All scenes are well done! Acting is great too! Joxer is by far the comic relief.

Having been a Hitchcock fan for forty years I have not been able to see this until now, thanks to a very cheap and poor quality DVD.

This straightforward fill of Sean O'Casey's play turns out to be a powerful piece of admittedly primitive early film-making. This is from a time when sound editing was impossible - scenes had to be taken in long takes with four cameras and cut ins added in - very much like studio TV.

I am shocked that one reviewer refers to bad photography with heads cut off. That's the bad transfer on the disc which cuts quite a lot of the image, often cutting of heads. If we could see a good print this would be powerful stuff with, surprisingly, a lot of very strong Hitchcock moments - including a ma in atrench coat waiting in the street - to execute JOhnny who was betrayed his republican group. It's also an extraordinarily authentic picture of an intensely catholic world. Ireland is still suffering from internal fighting but the is celebrating independence - but at the same time these people suffer from extreme judgemental attitudes. The rejection of the pregnant daughter by her previous boyfriend is simple and chilling.

We desperately need restorations of Hitchcock's pre 1934 films. The silents are excellent when you see them pristine. The copies in circulation are only hints of what they are really like. In its way a key work in Hitchcock's oeuvre. He may have dismissed it in the TRuffaut interviews, but take that with a pinch of salt. He avoids any mention of Fritz Lang influence too - and yet if you see Spione, M, or the Mabuse films you see how much he owed to Lang.

Sean O'Casey's controversial stage play about a shanty Irish family caught up in the times of Ireland's fight for independence get's a rough going over in this Alfred Hitchcock screen adaptation. With it's primitive soundtrack O'Casey's eloquence and dark wit is often garbled and indecipherable. Master of suspense Hitchcock seems content to just film the stage play with about half a dozen set ups and few camera movements. Performance wise he enlists stage vets from The Vic and The Abbey who en masse chew the scenery to pieces. Trained to reach the audience in the rear of the balcony the players are ill suited to the nuance required in this new art form and they remain over the top from start to finish.

Hitch does display flashes of brilliance with the new medium of sound in a couple of scenes involving the informer family member wracked with guilt and paranoia but for the most part he plays it safe, allowing his thespians to recite O'Casey's lyrical dialogue which technical bugs trample.

Dated as it may be Juno and the Paycock performed on stage can be a powerful theatre going experience with its memorable characters and well balanced tragi-comic theme that rails against social hypocrisy. I'm not sure a "sophisticated" film version today would do the play the justice that it receives's within the intimacy of the stage where one gets the feeling your sitting in the Boyles parlor. Suffice to say the 1929 version leaves you in the basement looking for a light switch.

Juno and the Paycock is very much like Sean O'Casey's other filmed work, The Plough and the Stars. Both plays are centered on typical Irish families in Dublin trying to survive in times of strife. Plough and the Stars takes place during the Easter Rebellion and Juno and the Paycock takes place during the Civil War after the British leave everything but Ulster.

The Boyle family who are the protagonists are not the noblest clan ever put on film, but I think a lot of us would recognize ourselves more than we care to admit. Sara Allgood is mother Boyle, nicknamed Juno who bears all kinds of tribulations for the 90 minutes of the film. She has one useless husband who'd spend all his time in the pub if he could, a son who's an amputee lost in the fighting, and a daughter who gets taken in my an English solicitor who brings news of an inheritance and then takes advantage of the daughter.

Sean O'Casey got good and slammed after these two plays were produced, showing a side of Irish life that wasn't pleasant. Today they are masterpieces.

Juno and the Paycock could probably use a more modern production now. This was one of Alfred Hitchcock's earliest sound features, but it really is a photographed stage play for the most part. When John Ford did The Plough and the Stars he very cleverly cut in a lot of newsreel footage from the Easter Rebellion giving a real feeling for the times.

What Ford did and what Hitchcock didn't do was inject typical John Ford touches in the film so it is more Ford and O'Casey. Hitchcock was hardly as well known in 1930 as opposed to the reputation he later developed. The Hitchcock touches that we all later came to know are hardly present here. In fact this really isn't a Hitchcock kind of film at all. But he did it as a contractual obligation.

Because it wasn't his kind of film, Hitchcock dismissed it. But the film is definitely true to what O'Casey was trying to convey.

Good story, but poorly executed. Juno and the Paycock is another less than stellar early film from Alfred Hitchcock. The story is actually quite interesting, revolving around a poor Irish family who begin putting on airs when they think they are about to inherit a fortune. Comedy and drama blend nicely in this script, letting us get to know the characters in a lighthearted setting before descending into full fledged tragedy. Sara Allgood and Edward Chapman head up a good ensemble cast as the long suffering wife and lazy, drunkard husband, respectively. The film also has a rare edgy quality for its time, as the actors were able to get away with some swearing and irreverence. Sex, however, was still the one thing that could not be talked about. You have to figure out for yourself that the daughter has been knocked up by her boyfriend because they will never just say so. The downfall of the film is that Hitchcock seems to have been uninterested in his own subject. The film feels cheaply thrown together with none of the director's usual style or active storytelling. The spars camera work makes the movie seem like little more than a filmed recording of the stage play it was adapted from. With a little imagination this could have been much better.