He was further impeded in his enjoyment of film by an almost pathological dislike of actors, whom he despised as exhibitionists incapable of writing their own scripts. Cinema was for him a perverse medium which put ‘first things last’, first things being ‘the writer and his script’, not actors, producers, directors (28 February 1949). Despite his general loathing for actors, he did have some favourite film stars: Dorothy McGuire, James Cagney whom he had first seen in The Pluck of the Irish in 1938, Ginger Rogers (‘a really amusing actress’), Ingrid Bergman (‘possibly the most beautiful and charming woman to be seen on the screen these days’), Leslie Howard and Walter Pidgeon. He had a certain tendresse for Kathleen Ryan, the Dublin beauty whom he had known from her theatre school days at the Abbey. She played in Esther Waters and Odd Man Out. For him the real stars were the comedians, the Marx Brothers (Groucho was his favourite), Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello (who made him ‘laugh till he was sore’), but not Charlie Chaplin (‘that vulgarian’).
If Kavanagh had his way, Dublin film-goers would have stayed at home most weeks. He certainly did his best to empty the city’s cinemas, rubbishing most of their offerings. He even took advantage of his position in a religious journal to commend those readers who gave up cinema attendance for Lent; a film-free diet would be good for their souls (11 March 1949). He was also insufferably condescending about cinema audiences, the ‘queues of drab little girls’ who ‘shuffle towards their Aladdin’s cave certain that they will find therein romance and colour and song and dance’ (8 November 1946). His own journalist’s pass obviated the need to queue and he was so infuriated when the manager of the Grafton Cinema would not let him jump the queue on a busy Sunday that he informed his readers of this supreme indignity. The taste in entertainment manifested by Irish cinema-goers horrified him; they even went in droves to such phoney representations of Ireland as Do You Love Me? starring Maureen O’Hara and featuring ‘Mother Machree and all her family begotten in the greenest depths of New York and Hollywood’. Nevertheless, he was helpless against Dubliners’ addiction to the cinema — most Sunday evening performances were almost fully booked by mid-week — and all he could hope to achieve by his weekly fulminations was to redistribute the crowd between cinemas. In fact, he was so indiscriminate in his invective that most cinema patrons would have ignored his advice.
By mid-June, only four months into the job of film critic, he was already finding it ‘intolerable’. Most of the time, he complained, he was bored in the cinema and couldn’t sit out the film. The supreme compliment he could pay to any film was that it held him in his seat to the end. War films, of which there were many during his post-war tenure of office, were among his pet hates, especially anti-Gestapo films. ‘We have paid and are paying for our neutrality with the cinematic equivalent of blood and tears and toil and sweat’, he wrote on 12 April 1946. The title, Action in the North Atlantic, ‘tells enough . . . to let us know we have seen it many times before’ (19 July 1946). His dismissals of many other films were similarly direct: ‘None of these films can be recommended for people of average intelligence’; ‘The man who could sit down and write anything but inanity out of the material provided by the current films would be a remarkable fiction writer’ (5 September 1947). His review of Ziegfeld Follies at the Capitol concluded with a parody of an acknowledgments notice from a newspaper obituary column: ‘It would be impossible to enumerate them individually, so I hope that my friends accept this note in acknowledgment of their messages of sympathy to me at my having to go to this film’ (14 February 1947). Some of his condemnations were markedly succinct. The verdict on This Love of Ours was ‘this film stinks’; on Cry Wolf, starring Errol Flynn, ‘Its age is mentally deficient 18’; on Bedside Manner at the Metropole, ‘I stuck its inanity for the best part of an hour.’
Week after week he perversely persisted in seeking ‘artistic excitement’ and ‘intellectual stimulation’ in the capital’s cinemas, invariably expressing disappointment. At the end of his first year as reviewer he took a retrospective glance at the films of the year. How many of them had been memorable? Not one of them, he concluded, had ‘been a real experience — like seeing bluebells in May or reading a new poem’ (27 December 1946). Readers wrote in to enquire if he was ever going to praise a film (17 October 1947).
On a few occasions he did. In general he enjoyed ‘roaring melodrama’, ‘unholy hokum’, well-made Westerns, and the kind of film that did not pretend to be realist. He congratulated the Irish Film Society for bringing Continental films to Dublin, such as Derrière la Façade and The Well-Digger’s Daughter (11 October 1946). Most comedies appealed to him, but he found Walt Disney cartoons ‘humourless’. At one Abbot and Costello show he laughed so much and so loudly that the man in front of him turned round three or four times to stare at him with astonishment. He maliciously concluded that the man was an ‘intellectual’ (15 November 1946).
He was keen on newsreels and lamented that Dublin had no news cinemas like London, where he could drop in during a slack period and be informed. This was an extension of his addiction to newspapers. His passion for information, however trivial, led him to commend biopics, documentaries, or films that included some contemporary footage. Rhapsody in Blue, a biopic of George Gershwin, was praised because of its depiction of America in the roaring twenties. Well worth seeing too was I’ll Be Your Sweetheart because of its theme: English music-hall in the early years of the twentieth century and the battle towards the Copyright Act of 1911, which protected song writers against piracy and infringement by performance. He was excited by a film on Roosevelt which included shots of ‘Hitler and Mussolini marching, shouting, the invading armies, men wounded and dying, the meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the rest at their various conferences etc.’ (11 June 1948). An Irish-made short at the Adelphi, ‘Scrapbook for 1922’, met with his approval because of its use of contemporary footage, including shots of Michael Collins. He enthused over I Met a Murderer because of the ‘photography of rural England’: ‘Here we had fields of wheat and old laneways and hedges and corners of fields so warmly evoked by the camera that we could walk through them in imagination’ (28 November 1947).
Favourite films in addition to Pygmalion, The Petrified Forest and The Cheat were Oliver Twist, Nanook of the North, A Day at the Races, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Les Enfants du Paradis. The two current releases he most enjoyed were Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier, and The Red Shoes. The first time he watched Hamlet he commented that the large draughty settings made it more likely that the prince’s father would have died of pneumonia instead of poison, but he went on to have a love affair with this film, entitling one of the columns in which he raved about it, ‘Man in Love’. He went at least four times to Hamlet, which he eulogised as ‘the most beautiful thing in the realm of the Arts that Dublin has ever seen’ (8 October 1948). The Red Shoes he went to at least twice. Moira Shearer’s dancing was ‘a joy forever’ and the film itself was a work of art: ‘It gives a sense of wonder and expansion to the imagination, makes a man believe in life.’ The film’s allegorical message about the artist corresponded perfectly with his own view on the involuntary and obsessional nature of the artistic vocation:
The question is ‘What do you want from life? Are you willing to sacrifice all the pleasures of this world on the altar of art? . . . Hans Andersen’s ‘red shoes’ were magic shoes. A little girl put her feet into them not knowing that the shoes would dance her to her death. That often happens men who casually offer themselves to the religious or poetic life. There is no stopping. Relentlessly they are danced to their destiny. The great saints and the great poets have their greatness thrust upon them. They are pursued by the Hound of Heaven. They are wearing the ‘red shoes’.
Towards the end of his term of office as film critic, Kavanagh defined his function: ‘to provide readers with a point of view, a point of attack, from which they can proceed to their own judgments’ (15 April 1949). For much of the time this resulted in the subo
rdination of film critiques to a general discussion of the issues or topics they called to mind. On 6 September 1946, for instance, there are 137 lines of general commentary as against 40 lines on the new films on release in Dublin that week. An ostensible review of Caesar and Cleopatra turned into a lengthy diatribe against Shaw, with the films showing at the Capitol, the Grafton and Carlton relegated to six lines at the end of the column. Once he went so far as to remark, ‘Was I writing about films? I had almost forgotten’ (14 January 1949).
One of his recurring themes was the need for a native film industry and he lamented the Rank Organisation’s infiltration of cinema ownership in Ireland, of the Metropole and the Savoy chain, for instance, because this extended its influence over the cinematic fare on offer. He was scathing about the films made in Denham and Hollywood that purported to represent Ireland, the Begorrah genre. Not even I See a Dark Stranger, in which he himself had taken part, escaped his lash; it was analysed in detail as an example of an inauthentic, stage-Irish film (9 August 1946). There was a real need for films that would represent Irish people and scenes authentically. A National Film Institute of Ireland had been founded in 1943 with government recognition and with the approbation and blessing of the hierarchy, but Kavanagh feared that government patronage would result in propagandist films, either nationalist or touristy. Film directors would probably be civil servants who had passed exams. The film made for the Thomas Davis centenary in 1945, A Nation Once Again, fulfilled his worst fears as to what a state-sponsored industry would produce:
Its purpose is to show Thomas Davis’ importance to our nationhood by relating modern life back to Davis. There was not nearly enough of the real Ireland of fairly dull, fairly respectable farming, shopkeeper, professional life . . . (29 March 1946)
At the beginning of July 1948 he wished the Adelphi well in its coming ‘Irish Week’, but when he had actually viewed what was on offer, he was disappointed. My Hands are Clay drew an exceptionally abusive review both because it was an Irish film which derived its view of the Irish from Hollywood and the musical-hall Paddy, and because it represented the artist as one who relies totally on inspiration and undergoes no technical training. In this case the plot revolved around a boy who became a sculptor through sheer inspiration without learning to draw. ‘Torture by embarrassment’ was Kavanagh’s verdict on it. No film critic’s salary could compensate him for having to sit through it.
He went to Carlingford for the shooting of Paul Vincent Carroll’s Saints and Sinners, but reported that it promised to be another stage-Irish production. Kenneth Reddin’s Another Shore, set in Dublin, was dismissed as ‘Another Bore’: ‘Dublin itself with all its glamour is buried in the deadness of the dusty dialogue and the silliness of the theme.’ Why hadn’t Myles na gCopaleen been asked to write the dialogue? (3 December 1948). Odd Man Out was one of the few commercial films set in Ireland which he applauded; he thought it brought Belfast alive. Since the failure to establish a native cinema was largely due to a lack of finance, he proposed that a half-dozen of Ireland’s richest men come together and be prepared to lose £100,000. Meanwhile, low-budget local films interested him as forerunners of a native cinema. The Irish Film Society’s 3½ mm film of a cockfight in Crumlin met with his approval. The home-made documentary he most applauded was The Bridge of the Ford, the story of Drogheda:
The photography is simple, evocative and beautiful. This is the nearest thing to a film made from the inside that I have yet seen. One remembers the shot of the hand-clapping cattle deal and many another photograph which caught the spirit of a locality that has been largely ignored in favour of more picturesque venues. (4 March 1949)
Most other Irish-made films ‘continued to romanticise Ireland, to show Paul Keating or Paul Henry-like landscapes and to overlook the less scenic parts’, those ‘large tracts where neither bog, mountain, cabin or wild Irish man exists’. The problem with Irish artists was that they were ‘always seeking the romantic in the extraordinary and the romantic is not in the extraordinary’. An ‘original and exciting documentary’ could be compiled from what Thomas MacDonagh calls ‘the common furniture of life’ and he broadly hinted that given the services of a cameraman he could direct such a documentary himself, quoting a series of images from The Great Hunger (Part I, lines 18–20) to show the kind of material that should be recorded on film (8 March 1946).
Local cinema also had its humorous side. Perusing the Report of the Irish Film Society on local film-making activity, he came upon a note that tickled his funny bone: the Portlaoighise Branch had presented a number of documentaries to ‘various kinds of cultural bodies in Laoighis and neighbouring counties’; these cultural bodies included ‘Shaen Sanatorium and Portlaoighise Prison’ (23 July 1948).
A second theme that occupied much of Kavanagh’s attention as film commentator was the representation of romantic love. The piece of film dialogue on love that seemed to him to ring most true occurred in So Well Remembered, where a young girl questions a drunken doctor:
Why did he marry her?
He loved her.
That’s too general . . . why really did he marry her?
This was to his mind a typical piece of feminine common sense on the subject of love and marriage. When it came to courtship, women, he found, were practical and pragmatic. His first months as film critic coincided with Hilda’s desertion of him, which inevitably coloured his views. On 26 April 1946 he remarked ruefully that ‘it was only in Hollywood films that females fluttered around the lamp of genius’. Hollywood taught that ‘the flesh that grows on man and woman between the ages of 16 and 30’ is ‘the only thing worthwhile in mankind’ (15 November 1946) — not a view that the 40-something critic was ready to endorse. In 1947, when Hilda Moriarty was about to marry his rival, he may have been sending her a signal that he was no longer pining for her when he wrote of the constant lover in The Secret Heart:
The notion that the amorous emotion is constant is complete sentimentality — in other words, a lie. But it is a very popular lie. The amorous emotion is no more than a bedrugging gas from which time awakes us to reality . . . (4 July 1949)
Owing to the vigilance of the film censor, Dr Richard Hayes, explicit sex scenes were not shown in Irish cinemas, but the author of The Great Hunger had grown so puritanical that he was liable to object to any kissing or hand-holding on screen: ‘all that promiscuous kissing in public’, ‘kissing of a kind that ought to shock decent people’, ‘the cuddling and coaxing and holding of hands’. He sounds rather like a Redemptorist missioner from the forthcoming Tarry Flynn; but the reason for his censoriousness was that such public displays violated love’s intimacy, they betrayed a ‘disregard for the delicacies of the private heart’ (10 October 1947). He complained that the minds of film-goers were ‘dosed’ with ‘sentimental love trash’. Hollywood films were also indoctrinating their viewers with a non-Catholic marital morality, introducing the spectacle of ‘a group of people to whom extra-marital love-making is a commonplace’. MGM’s Perfect Strangers, starring Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr, he condemned as ‘the most deliberate propaganda for divorce that I have yet seen on the screen’. Inevitably, Kavanagh’s ultra-conservative views on women were aired in his film column. The principal defect of the film They Were Sisters was that it ‘popularised the middle-class Freudian feminist outlook’, the false ‘emancipated woman’ view of marriage, the view that a married woman should retain all her individuality in the same way as when she was unmarried (26 April 1946).
Towards the end of his stint as film critic Kavanagh went to ‘the pictures’ in the parochial hall in Inniskeen. As part of a fund-raising drive in the parish, a 16 mm projector had been installed and films were being shown twice a week. True to form, he lamented this latest attempt to ameliorate ‘the distress known as the Drabness of Rural Life’ by lowering country people to the level of ‘the doped queue in a city street’. The village hall, with its stackable chairs arranged in rows and an Abbott and Costello farce ‘flickerin
g, out of focus’ on a small screen, was the poor man’s version of the city cinema. Outside the primroses were blooming and the trout leaping in the river, while these people sat ‘in a darkened hall watching something that was a good deal worse than worthless’. To him it would have been preferable to see men playing pitch and toss at the crossroads or drinking in the village pub (15 April 1949).
Kavanagh’s opinionated, de haut en bas attitude to film criticism amused readers, who looked on his column as mere entertainment, but it exasperated some cinema-buffs who thought that he was acting in bad faith. Eamon MacCormaic of Cawnpore Street, Belfast articulated the views of such readers:
. . . for some time past we have been treated to the views (one would not call such dogmatic pronouncements intelligent criticism) of Mr Patrick Kavanagh. We have been regaled with his peculiar opinions on such diverse topics as poetry, novels, psychology — the drama, but curiously little has he had to say about film under which caption his name appears.
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 36