Blarney Stoned

After Ryan's Daughter came and went, it looked like The Informer would reign as the Sultan of Celtic schmaltz until the end of the millennium. But in the past 10 years, The informe_r's stranglehold on the scepter of blarney has been seriously challenged again and again. First came _A Prayer for the Dying, the Mickey Rourke vehicle about a penitent IRA gunman who decides on a career change after he sees a bomb intended for the hated Brits blow up a bunch of Irish schoolkids. Sporting a brogue as thick as the mists wafting in from the Irish Sea, Mickey is the only actor in history who has ever given the oversized McLaglen a serious run for his money as the Bey of Blarney.

People familiar with this magazine will note that this is not the first time I have written about A Prayer for the Dying. First, I wrote about it in a story about ridiculous accents. Then I wrote about it in a story about impersonating Mickey Rourke for a day. Then I wrote about it in a story about blind people. Then I wrote about it in a story about lovable psychopaths. And now I am writing about it here. Cynical readers might be tempted to say that I am merely recycling my old material, that I have become a lazy old hack. This is terribly shortsighted. The reason I have written about A Prayer for the Dying so much is that, from the dyspeptic critic's point of view, it is the most useful film ever made. No matter what you're writing about, this is the movie you can always fall back on to get you out of a tight spot. It has bad accents, blind teenagers, lovable terrorists, overwrought crucifixion imagery, blustery priests, lovable whores and Mickey Rourke. It is the one-size-fits-all bad movie. I love this movie more than life itself.

The next load of pure malarkey to challenge The Informer was the 1990 film The Field. A genuine curse-of-the-Chieftains affair, this film starts with the pipes, the pipes, then quickly gets worse. Richard Harris plays an ornery fanner who is determined to buy a field he has been renting for many years from a local widow. Because the rented field was nothing but rock when he started working it, Harris feels that in a certain Paddy O' mythical sense it belongs to him now. Alas, this is not the way the Irish real estate market works. The widow decides to put the field up for sale, whereupon Tom Berenger appears, an ugly American who wants to buy the field, pave it over and develop it. Talk about ethnic stereotyping.

Harris handles this situation in the traditional way, by killing Berenger, but when a wise local priest points the finger at him for the unsolved murder, he decides to throw a huge temper tantrum and drive all his cattle off a cliff, killing his son in the process. With its knowing clerics, love of the land, canny locals, village idiot, the pipes, the pipes that are constantly calling from glen to glen and down the mountainside, and lines such as, "You could do worse than lie with the tinker's daughter under the stars." The Field is a major work of blarney, and deserves to be honored as such. In fact, in Ireland itself the film is known as Sean de Florette. And yes, it is true that you could do worse than lie with the tinker's daughter. You could lie with the tinker's daughter and have to watch this film at the same time.

Despite its many charms, The Field cannot really hold a candle to the 1994 Film A Man of No Importance. In this wee, small, charming affair, Albert Finney plays a lovable ticket taker on a Dublin bus who recites poetry to his passengers every morning. Surprisingly, they do not tear him limb from limb. The ticket taker wants to stage Oscar Wilde's heathen play Salome at the local church--and hence the film is notable for being the first major Hibernian coming-out picture. Towards the end of the movie, Finney, who has never actually been intimate with another man, gets dressed up like Oscar Wilde and visits a gay bar, where he is beaten and robbed by a bunch of gay, young Irish hustlers, which is what usually happens to senior citizens who get dressed up like Oscar Wilde, and not just in Dublin.

What is this odd little film trying to tell us? It is telling us that Finney is a rebel, a maverick, a man who goes his own way, a will-o'-the-wisp, and in a very real sense, a complete asshole. Indeed, the only thing that prevents the film from being one of the biggest loads of blarney of all time is that it has no pipes. For the life of me I can't figure out how they forgot that.

The Secret of Roan Inish does have pipes. And it's got flutes. It's got drums. It's got superstition. It's got wee, canny little people running all over the place. And yes, like most of its predecessors, it has a village idiot. A charming tale of a wee tyke who makes a deal with a pack of seals to restore her kidnapped brother to his real family, The Secret of Roan Inish rates very high on the Blarney-o-meter.

Blarney of a very high quality has also been evident in Circle of Friends (Catholic girls, abortion, the pipes, the pipes), Into the West, The Snapper, My Left Foot and The Commitments, but in recent years, the biggest challengers to The Informer have emerged from an unexpected place. Not as unexpected as Iraq, but still surprising: the U.S.A.

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