Sean O'Casey: The Spirit of Ireland

Sean O'Casey who chronicled the people if not the events of his beloved Ireland's liberation from Great Britain is probably Ireland's greatest man of letters. I say that knowing that both George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde came from Ireland. But they did their work in Great Britain and O'Casey was first and foremost an Irish patriot.

But he saw all the human flaws as well as the good in his people and wrote what he saw in such work as Juno And The Paycock and The Plough And The Stars. That did not make him popular with his contemporaries, but these works and others are considered masterpieces now.

John Ford conceived of, but never actually worked in the final process of putting Young Cassidy together. The film was based on the life of O'Casey in his youth and got to the string with Jack Cardiff at the helm.

This short subject which has some of the cast and crew from Young Cassidy in it also shows some of contemporary Dublin which was O'Casey's city and not much changed from the Twenties to the Sixties. From what I'm told it's changed a great deal from then to the present.

Sean O'Casey: The Spirit Of Ireland is a nice promotional film for the feature Young Cassidy. It's a film I like so of course I would like this as well.

In the 1960s, coming attractions changed. Long the most conservative of film genres, the people who made them knew they could no longer depend on the entire program, or the assurance that this was from a production company you could trust. Instead, they had to tout the movie as a unique event, one worth leaving home to see. This is one of them.

This coming attraction for Jack Cardiff and John Ford's YOUNG CASSIDY takes that seriously, with not only the usual clips from the movie, but behind-the-scenes shots, and concentration on the two lead performers... and the director, as a statement that here was an important movie in the hands of professionals who could do it justice.