Juno and the Paycock

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.

Sean O'Casey's play does not translate to the screen very well. A bit talky, it may have worked fine on stage, but it is not movie material. Still Hitchcock has moments where he shows his genius as a filmmaker. There are camera shots and editing cuts that tell more of the story than any of O'Casey's dialog.

Still, I would not recommend this film for anyone who is new to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Save this one for the advance class, and let the beginners view "The Secret Agent," "Shadow of a Doubt," "Vertigo," and "Psycho," just to name a few.

This has to be Hitchcock's least cinematic film he ever made. It's a filmed play with almost nothing cinematic to add to the mix. It's a miscalculation of the early sound era that equated theater and film because they shared a lot of the same parts. There are actors, sets, lights, and dialogue, and yet the mediums are actually really different because of the camera and the edit inherent in film.

The story itself is nothing that special. It's the counterfeit rise and then real fall of a poor Irish family in the early 20th century. The titular Juno is the female head of a small household of four with two adult children, and the paycock is the male head. Juno's level-headed while her husband, Jack, spends as much of his time drinking in a bar as possible. The girl, Mary, is courting a young man while the boy, Johnny, lost his arm in the Irish Civil War while fighting with the IRA. There's a good amount of time trying to set up all four characters, but most of the time is really dedicated to Jack, the vessel through which most of the exposition flows.

The story turns when they discover a relative has died and left them several thousand pounds. Their hardscrabble life is over. Jack's drinking away all of their extra money is done. Immediately Juno goes out and starts taking out large loans for furniture and other items around the house. Mary gets the attention of a new beau who whisks her away from her current beau, Jack feels like a big man around town, and Johnny stays remote and hidden in the background, consumed about news that started the movie of one of his friends from the IRA having gotten killed. The treatment of Johnny is the only real cinematic touch in the entire film. As conversation goes on around him, the camera pushes in to watch him at key points of the film. It's probably the only way to highlight him since he's so quiet through much of the story anyway.

The predictable thing happens and the money from the relative doesn't come through. Seriously, the second I saw Juno in the furniture shop taking on the debt, I knew there wasn't going to be any actual money for the family. The family then gets brought low. They have to sell everything from the new furniture to the old to settle their debts. Mary's new beau disappears after he impregnates her, leaving her a ruined woman in 1924 Ireland and disowned by her father. Johnny gets carried away as an informer by other members of the IRA. Jack takes the last of his money from his shoe and goes off to have a drink. Juno's left alone in the empty apartment, wailing about the fate of her family.

Now, the weirdest part of the ending is that, at least the way the film presents it, it feels like the movie itself agrees with Juno's assertion is that Jack is the source of their financial woes, but it wasn't Jack who went and took out massive loans. She was the cause of the family's newly destitute state. Jack just drank, like he always did. If the moment is supposed to be ironic, that depends on the execution of the individual performance, and I don't think the movie captures that feeling.

Anyway, in terms of the story itself, it's fine. It's not great, but it's fine. In terms of its cinematic execution, it's boring. It's a series of long, static shots that never look in the direction of the fourth wall in any of the limited environments. It's quite literally a filmed play, and I think it suffers for it.

Blackmail was in production when The Jazz Singer came out and they retooled it for sound. It was already effectively one picture that got sound added. Juno and the Paycock feels like a studio not quite sure what to do with sound finding one of the more obvious choices (a play) and just handing the assignment to one of their contract directors. I get the sense that it was filmed really quickly, possibly in less than a week, and then quickly assembled for release. This feels like chasing a fad more than compelling storytelling.

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.