Kathleen Mavourneen

A good way to wind up my old friend Dennis Casey is to start talking about the old Irish politicians in New York City. This will set him off into a red-faced rant about them sitting around the club house, getting plastered on Guinness and Bushmill and practicing their brogues to charm his elderly relatives. He will then give an impersonation, which will sound like every character in this movie ... ending with his singing, in a fine tenor, the song whose title this movie borrows.

That's what this 1930 movie from Tiffany-Stahl is like: every last hackneyed sentimental idea of the Irish, without a hint of self-aware humor in it, as Sally O'Neill (with a stage Irish accent covering her usual Bayonne voice), coming over from Ireland to marry her plumber lover, only to be courted by every last Tammany politician who spots her in her white party dress.

It's an ambitious, creaky musical from the dawn of the sound era, and doesn't wear well for these cynical times, but if you've got a sentimental streak wider than the fields of the Emerald Isle -- or have drunk enough Guinness and Bushmill, sure and you'll wind up in happy tears, like Dennis always does.