Young Cassidy

Er, not that Cassidy....

One of TCM's daytime themes back in December was of "young" characters, that is some famous people earlier in their lives. The movies included Young Cassidy, which is on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection. Not having blogged about it here before, I decided to watch and do a post about it.

Rod Taylor plays the title role, a man named John Cassidy who ultimately becomes the Irish playwright Seán O'Casey, whom you may recall from Alfred Hitchcock's version of his play Juno and the Paycock. (He was born John Casey, and among his pen names was apparently Cassidy and a Gaelicized version of Cassidy.) He's a laborer in Dublin circa 1910, a time in Irish history which was about to get very turblent, something that you may again remember from another classic movie, Clark Gable's Parnell. A lot of the Irish are getting radicalized due to the grinding poverty and want home rule if not outright independence. As for Cassidy, he tries to add to the support of his family by writing revolutionary pamphlets and short stories.

Along the way, Cassidy meets the prostitute Daisy (Julie Christie) and has a brief affair with her; he also meets bookstore employee Nora (Maggie Smith) and has an affair with her to. A couple of the events in the run-up to the 1916 Uprising are depicted, but Cassidy rejects joining the military arm of the revolutionaries because he thinks their military tactics are stupid. Eventually Cassidy sells a short story but is apparently too stupid to know what a check is or how to open a bank account, and he needs that money to pay for the funeral of his dear beloved Irish mother (Flora Robson).

Cassidy continues to struggle and eventually writes a play Shadow of a Gunman, which the famous writier and Abbey Theatre proprietor W. B. Yeats (played by Michael Redgrave; the name rhymes with mates and not meats) accepts for staging. It's not much of a success, but Cassidy eventually writes another play, The Plough and the Stars that causes a literal riot at the Abbey Theater (this was based on a real incident), and Cassidy has to leave for England, eventually becoming Seán O'Casey.

There's probably enough material in O'Casey's life to make a good biopic, but we don't really get it in Young Cassidy. That's because it was produced by John Ford, who was supposed to direct as well before illness got in the way. Ford had a nauseatingly doe-eyed view of Ireland culminating in the ultra-treacly The Quiet Man. Irish politics of the era was incredibly complex, since there was all that difficulty with Britain followed by a Civil War (to this day, the two biggest parties in Irish politics don't fit into the standard left-right spectrum seen in most other countries). But with the large number of Irish-Americans, we only seem to get a view of the country that says "Britain Bad, anti-Britain good" and generally avoids the complexity. (Granted, I probably go too far in the opposite direction from growing up with a mother of Irish descent and seeing the inveterate whining of the sort of Irish-Americans still claiming to be fighting against bigotry that hadn't existed for generations.) John Ford is probably the worst of the lot when it comes to the subject.

Still, some of the acting is good, as should be expected when you've got people like Maggie Smith and Michael Redgrave in the cast, and the production values with Irish location shooting are good. And some of you will probably like this one more than I did. So as always, watch and judge for yourself.