Rooney

The theme tune for this film has stayed with me since I saw the film at the local Odeon.I even bought the 45rpm disc which I still have on the Top Rank label.It was sung by Michael Halliday,who died tragically young.I have now had the chance to view it on DVD and have to say that it is a very charming film. Almost the end of Barry Fitzgeralds long career he does appear as different as the character he plays. John Gregson and Muriel Pavlow,two Rank contract stars of the fifties make an engaging couple and they are supported by a lot of very familiar faces from.the era. Watching this film made me feel very nostalgic taking me back to the local Odeon all those years ago.

Great movie. Two lonely people discover each other. I always liked this film. So many times I have tried to buy it in VHS or DVD but no luck so far. I liked the Irish setting. I enjoy British/Irish films and I like the genre of the 1940s to 1950s. This movie was based on a Catherine Cookson novel of the same name. Anyone who knows the writings of Catherine Cookson knows that she creates a wonderful story. Too bad movie producers today cannot see the potential of this story in today's market. John Gregson is a great actor. The story shows the rubbish-collection industry, and how one lowly rubbish collector finds love and romance right under his nose.

This movie would be of great interest to historians and sociologists looking for a insight into Dublin in the 1950's, particularly the garbage collection business.

For the rest of us, it's a creaking story about a Dublin dustbin man who is blessed with a magnetic attraction for women and great hurling skills (the sport that is, not the bins).

There is probably something more interesting on....

In his last two films Barry Fitzgerald returned to his beloved Ireland and in Rooney joined some of his fellow Abbey Theater players alumni in the cast. Fitzgerald plays a very typical role for him, a crusty grandfather who is bullied by his children and finds some comfort in his granddaughter Muriel Pavlow.

However John Gregson plays the title role of Rooney who is an amateur curling player, but earns his living in the Dublin sanitation department. Despite these humble origins, he's quite the chick magnet and wherever he lives he's eventually got to move because he believes in loving them and leaving them and does not want to be tied down.

So he moves in as a renter to June Thorburn's house where's taking care of her father Barry Fitzgerald. But Barry's practically a prisoner in his own house. Eventually he takes a liking to Gregson and so does Pavlow.

Rooney is a simple plot about two very disparate people finding and falling for each other, but those characters are as deep as something by Eugene O'Neill. Fitzgerald performs his usual scene stealing magic.

Rooney is also a nice and very gray look at Dublin of the Fifties. And I found it interesting the way in the Irish culture they like their sports heroes amateurs. Gregson is the Albert Pujols of curling, but has to work as a garbageman to pay the rent. Completely different than the USA.

Rooney is a nice film about some nice people finding and falling for each other.

As all agree, this is an utterly charming, unpretentious film. It is helped by the acting talent of the famous Abbey Theatre, Dublin. And although the lead character of 'the Rooney' himself is played by an Englishman, John Gregson fairly inhabits his working-class Dublin character, with an accent that never jars in comparison to the real Irish actors - except perhaps he finds the test of acting tipsy while keeping the brogue a bit much for him. Of course today an English film about Irish life might seem patronising, but they did a creditably sympathetic job in 1958, perhaps helped by an Irish scriptwriter's fleshing out of Catherine Cookson's story and the wonderfully atmospheric filming of Dublin city.

A curiosity of the film is that Barry Fitzgerald's voice-over to the establishing shots of the Dublin of 1957 - the year when the filming was done - speaks complacently of the unchanging face of the old city, and references what was then a favourite landmark of all Dubliners, Nelson's Pillar, saying:

' - - - the dawn broke over the old city and everything was pretty much as it was the night before - and Nelson's statue still stood in O'Connell Street - - - .'

In retrospect, this observation has been made to seem ironical, since we know that the IRA blew the statue of Nelson atop his Pillar to smithereens shortly after 1:30 on the morning of 8 March 1966.

So the film is a nostalgic reminder of more innocent times. The official version of the reaction of Dubliners, to the destruction of this much-loved and familiar landmark, is that general gaiety broke out in the city. Certainly the Irish have an attractive penchant to make the best of anything - even a funeral. But some elderly people of that town I once spoke to were adamant that, on the whole, Dublin folk had rather 'the boyos' had left old Nelson where he was. And, when the remaining stump was blown up by the army, after the Corporation declared it 'a dangerous structure,' the good people of the Irish Capital sorely missed being able to take friends and relatives from the country up the spiral staircase, inside the Pillar, to share Nelson's unparallelled crow's-nest view of Dublin!

Part of the charm of old films is that they have become time-capsules, trapping the past as it flits through the lens, to preserve it's fluttering motion more perfectly than flies in amber!

And for lovers of unfamiliar sports, the filmed spectacle of an actual game of hurley, in which our fictional hero is presented as the star player, conveys all the ferocity of a game with ancient origins in the wild and often violent training of Irishmen for hand-to-hand combat in war - and since helmets and face-guards were still shunned at this time as badges of cowardice, one must admire the rugged ruins of many a battered face. Old Nelson's head, still lying in the Dublin City Library and Archive, is hardly the worse for wear.