Hamming it up for the old, imagined country
Adrian Frazier
Lilliput; €20
IN THE early 1930s, a series of American tours by the Abbey Theatre exposed its actors to vast new audiences and opened the door for them to enter Hollywood studios. The surprising consequence of this was how quickly the Abbey style as practiced by stars including Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields was “affectionately taken up into the vocabulary of global entertainment”.
Wonderfully illustrated, and drawing upon a horde of unpublished papers, Adrian Frazier’s rich history of the Irish Revival’s mutation from stage to screen criss-crosses from Dublin to New York, Los Angeles and back again. A rigorous and highly readable group biography, Hollywood Irish is the story of the Shields brothers, of Allgood and Una O’Connor, and, above all, of the director John Ford and his remarkable passion for Ireland.
Ford’s father was an immigrant bootlegger and saloon-keeper who had been born in rural Galway, while his mother’s people hailed from the Aran Islands. Yet, as much as anything else, Ford’s Irishness derived from his being an “unrepentant liar”. Based on a four-day visit to Spiddal during a truce in the War of Independence, the director — AKA Seán Martin Aloysius O’Feeney — styled himself an “Irish rebel and a freedom fighter”, though what he was, as Frazier puts it, was “a boaster and a bully”. Then again, he was also a genius.
Ford, says Frazier, saw some of his movies as additions to the Revival put forth by Yeats. His oft-defeated plans to establish a production company on the ‘ould sod spoke of a “full identification of the film-maker with the great Irish literary tradition, in a form profitable to Ireland and ennobling to its people worldwide”. In this, Frazier reads a need for a “symbolic ethnicity”, one which would eventually result in The Quiet Man (1952).
For that film, Ford cast not just Hollywood legends but also those Abbey actors who had joined his stock company over the years, chief among them Barry Fitzgerald. Born Will Shields, Fitzgerald was a “bookish, patriotic Irish Protestant with a love of the stage”. He revered Yeats and Lady Gregory, and was in turn regarded highly by writers like Seán O’Casey, who created the gasbag Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock for him to play.
His brother Arthur Shields was equally gifted, playing walk-on roles at the Abbey from the age of 16 and emerging from this book as a quietly remarkable figure. A member of the Volunteers who hid his rifle beneath the Abbey stage (along with the press on which the Proclamation was to be printed), Shields fought alongside James Connolly in the GPO in 1916 and represents an unexpected link between WB Yeats, for whom he ‘incarnates our traditions’ and John Ford, whom Frazier here positions as an Irish author.
Through Fitzgerald and Shields, Hollywood Irish offers a lively snapshot of what it was like to work in the Abbey in the 1920s and ‘30s, and how it must have felt to ride the energy of those first controversial O’Casey productions all the way to California. With the permanent arrival of the Shields brothers in Los Angeles in 1940, the reader glimpses the true disparity between their new world of “stilly, stupendous eclecticism” and the “wet, grey, low-rise Dublin” they had left behind.
While Shields would quickly find success in Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940), based on a series of one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, it was Fitzgerald who developed the reputation as a popular and dependable character actor.
Capable of bringing great life to supporting roles, Fitzgerald won an Oscar for his performance alongside Bing Crosby in Going My Way, the highest grossing picture of 1944. Such acclaim led to three more collaborations with Crosby and then to the role of a homicide detective in The Naked City (1948), the ancestor of today’s CSI dramas.
While a brief chapter on Sara Allgood allows Frazier to challenge the accepted sad-emigrant cliché of her story, that strand of book feels less connected to the overall narrative. Successful on Broadway and in Hollywood, Allgood nonetheless proved problematic to work with, making herself unpopular on the set of Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941). As a result, she was not invited to the “family vacation for Irish and Irish American actors” by which Ford, Fitzgerald and Shields carried Hollywood, along with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, back to Ireland to make The Quiet Man in 1951.
Ford had bought the rights to Maurice Walsh’s short story of the same name in 1936, but in the 15 years it took to get it into production the director’s anti-British vitriol had been tempered by his service in World War II. As Commander John Ford, USNR, he headed a photographic unit, was wounded filming the Battle of Midway and later participated in the D-Day landings. It left him, Frazier says, with much more respect towards the British armed forces and so he exorcised the IRA from Walsh’s story, instead setting The Quiet Man during a time of vague peace. The film, Frazier rightly argues, is thus best viewed as a post-war, coming-home picture.
Moreover, Ford was keen for The Quiet Man to immortalise the Abbey style of acting. “Those film stars playing Irish people ham it up in sometimes corny fashion,” Frazier says, but then “Abbey actors have always done that too”. He traces how Ford packed the picture with faces recognisable to Dublin theatregoers and with riffs on the work of Yeats and Lady Gregory, a conscious tribute to the comedy of Revival players and playwrights. There are heavy allusions too to JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, with The Quiet Man supplying that play’s missing pony-racing scene.
Anyone who has read Frazier’s weighty George Moore 1852-1933 will know his style is clear and engaging, replete with hilarious asides but grounded by scrupulous attention to history and texts. Unquestionably the work of a major scholar, his prose is the opposite of the obfuscating, theory-driven gobbledygook disgorged by universities today. Hollywood Irish provides astute analysis of relevant films, but its strength is bringing vivid life to Fitzgerald, Shields, and particularly Ford as characters in their own right.
Frazier accomplishes this without ever buying into Ford’s customary self-mythologising, and debunks more stories than he confirms. But reassessing Ford is not Frazier’s sole purpose here. Throughout the book he emphasises how ethnic ideas are consciously remade by creative practitioners. Ireland, says Frazier, is a brand and the people who created it have their roots not only on page, stage and screen, but on both sides of the Atlantic. The case he builds is entertaining, informative and utterly convincing. Indeed, when viewing The Quiet Man through Frazier’s eyes, it is difficult not to see all of Ireland as pure invention.
