Be careful, it could be contagious.
Excellent, thanks. Had not read that piece, because I am not much of a Hot Press reader.
NS takes Harris to the cleaners, same as Neil Jordan did on Harris’ screenplay.
What, exactly? There is so much…
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That’s not a burner I don’t think. That’s Marc Lynch.
I was in school with him and came across his Twitter recently. He was from Sixmilebridge and a handy hurler. Pleasant, humourous guy, easy going
I couldn’t believe how hardened his opinions had become and that he’d joined the British Army.
Tally Ho! Mr Harris
NEIL JORDAN
Wed, Oct 23, 1996, 01:00
ANY discussion of the historical veracity of my film, Michael Collins has to be predicated, I suppose, on the fact that it is a film. Film is a medium which in the space of two hours, can enact a drama - or be set within a drama - that took place over the three decades of the individual’s life. Film is not history, cannot be history, but every now and then makes use of history for its gown purposes.
So the only real kind of assessment can be a comparative one, one that compares different, filmic versions of the same subject with others. To make an assessment of the veracity of different versions, I have gone back to the archives, so to speak to discover what other treatments there have been of Michael Collins - even what other mentions of Michael Collins - in the archives of cinema.
The first one finds is a Samuel Goldwyn production made in the 1930s called Beloved Enemy. Directed by H.C. Potter, it was photographed by the great Gregg Toland and starred Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne.
Despite a disclaimer at the start, there are some comparisons to be drawn between the parts played by Oberon and Aherne and the figures of Collins and Lady Lavery. Aherne plays the part of Reardon, a Republican leader during the War of Independence who falls in love with Helen, the daughter of Lord Athleigh, a British diplomat attempting to find a way out of the conflict through peace talks. The film follows the trials of their relationship under pressure from Reardon’s Republican associates - chief among them one O’Rourke - and from the British forces, understandably anxious to capture Reardon, the most wanted man in the island.
It becomes more interesting when peace negotiations begin, with Helen pivotally placed both to convince her father to convene them in the first place, and to convince Reardon to stick with them and accept a compromise. The resulting treaty leads inevitably to Reardon’s death. He is shot by O’Rourke while making a public speech in support of the treaty he has signed.
The film is conventional, perhaps to a fault. Its histrionic portrayal of the Troubles is nowhere offset by any grace in Toland’s work. It is most notable for the fact that its ending was changed to a happy one (demonstrating even then inherent problems in the material for Hollywood) and for the fact that O’Rourke’s role in Reardon’s death could be confused with malicious rumours of the time about Emmet Dalton’s supposed role in the death of Michael Collins.
Which brings us to This Other Eden, an Emmet Dalton production based on an Abbey play by Louis D’Alton, directed by Muriel Box, in 1959.
As film historian Kevin Rockett points out in his admirable study of the National Film Studios, Emmet Dalton could have made this film, in part, as an answer to the malicious and unfounded rumours that surrounded him for most of his life, and by implication, to the film Beloved Enemy. It opens during the War Of Independence as Jack Carberry, an IRA leader, drives with his friend Devereux to a meeting with a British officer to negotiate an end to the war.
On his way he is shot by the Black and Tans. This sequence is a prologue to the main plot, which begins 30 years later in the village where the dead hero was born. A statue is being erected to him, which gives rise to mixed feelings among a host of characters. Among them are Devereux, who has long been suspected of complicity in Carberry’s death, Brown, an enlightened Englishman, and a group of local gombeen men of varying hues.
A satire of bitterness and disillusion ensues, the pivotal event being the blowing up of the statue by forces unknown, which could be seen to echo the disillusion and embitterment left by the War of Independence and the Civil War.
Both these films are most interesting for their techniques of avoidance - for the oblique fictional context within which the recent historical events are played. And it is precisely this avoidance of precise historical context that allows them raise the issues they are dealing with. So a comparison between actual and fictional events would be fruitless.
THE third reference in the archives of Irish cinema is a film as yet unmade, but much talked about over the past years, in particular by its screenwriter, Eoghan Harris. The screenplay is called Mick, and, unlike the movies mentioned above, it does purport to be an account of Collins’s life, deeds, and an assessment, I can only assume, of his significance in the broader events in our island of which he was a part. So a comparative study in this case can be made.
The script opens with the young Collins and his father taking a piglet to the market. On the way they observe soldiers supervising an eviction. (Students of history will note that the last eviction happened in Cork a decade before Collins was born.) After witnessing the eviction, they proceed to the market which is interrupted by a party of fox-hunting gentry careering down the main street. They ride roughly through the peasants, almost trampling a young six-year-old girl called Kitty. Kitty is pulled from the impending hooves of the horses by the young Collins. Among the hunting-party about to trample on Kitty is a 16-year-old Constance Gore-Booth. (Constance Gore-Booth’s home was in Lissadell in Sligo. Perhaps she had travelled from Lissadell to fox-hunt in west Cork.) Young Michael sticks out his tongue at her. Constance sticks her tongue out at him.
From the market, Michael and his father proceed to the railway station and watch a train pull in. On the train is Tom Clarke, manacled, in chains, being taken to England by the RIC. Tom Clarke gives the young boy a watch. Michael looks at the watch tick as the train pulls off. (There is no record of this meeting, or of this watch.) The action then cuts to London, 10 years later. Collins, described as thirtyish, serving his employment in a London post office. He travels to a London prison, where Tom Clarke is being strip-searched before being released. Collins meets Tom Clarke, watch in hand, to take him home. (Tom Clarke was released from prison in 1898. Collins would have been seven at the time.) Collins and Clarke travel from London through Ireland to a place described as Valley Of The Mouth Of The Flowers. (Presumably Beal Na Blath.) On the way they pass Constance Gore-Boothe, still on a hunter, shouting tally-ho. They arrive at a nearby town, where Kitty, now a young woman, admits them surreptitiously into a shop. There, Collins gathers recruits for the IRB. After this work is done, Kitty kisses him a fond goodnight, after vainly trying to entice him to stay with the offer of a hot whiskey. (We can now only presume this is Kitty Kiernan, of Granard, Co Longford. Geography, as well as history is getting confused here since The Valley Of the Mouth Of The Flowers, or Beal Na Blath, as everybody knows, is in West Cork.) The action then cuts to Lissadell House. Constance Gore-Booth is at home at last, but still on horseback, with a friend. They ride through a coppice but do not shout “Tally Ho!”. Instead, they observe Michael Collins in a game of hurley, which is in turn observed by two policemen. When the police move away, the game changes into a drilling-practice, with hurleys substituting for rifles. Constance makes the observation that this seems like fun.
Later that day, all of the above characters turn up at an election meeting where a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party is soliciting votes. The Irish Parliamentary Party member, described as portly and prosperous, asks the crowd of degraded, cheering drunks to vote for him, as he will beg for Home Rule and a little parliament of our own, but one loyal to the British Empire. Then, he observes, there will be whiskey and a good price for pigs. (This one must presume, represents the point of view of the party of John Redmond, the Irish, non-violent parliamentary tradition which stretches back to the days of Parnell.) Collins interrupts from the crowd and calls for a free Irish Republic. A riot ensues which is silenced by Constance Gore-Booth "with her imperious eye She tells the mob to be quiet or her father will evict them. She orders them then to listen to what Collins has to say. After they have listened, she invites Collins to dinner at the Big House.
Collins cycles on his bicycle towards Lissadell House. On his way he peers through a shrubbery of rhododendrons. There he observes a nude Hazel Lavery, seated on a fallen tree. She looks at him straight in the eye and then Sir John Lavery appears behind her, artist’s palette in hand, painting her. Collins backs off and bumps into Constance Gore-Booth who grins mischievously and says “Tally Ho Mr Collins! Come and meet everybody!” (Again, students of history will note that Collins met Lady Lavery for the first time in London during the Treaty negotiations.) Dinner ensues with all parties joined by Henry, Constance s father, and a military friend of hers called Crake. A political discussion ensues, and concludes when Collins invites the Gore-Booths to visit the cabins on their estates where they have never been. They travel down to the cabins where a wild ceili is in session, around an enormous bonfire. Observing the ceilli for some reason is Kitty. She watches unsmiling as Constance draws Collins into the ceili, shouting “Tally Ho!” As Constance loses herself in the abandon of set-dancing, Collins sits with Lady Lavery, who is sketching the scene, and they discuss the relative merits of art and revolution. The ceili concludes with Constance, in a magical political transformation that seems to have banished the phrase “Tally Ho!” from her vocabulary, promising the tenants their freedom. She promises freedom with the following logic - that she is a Gore-Booth: when the Gore-Booths promised them to hang they were hanged; when they promised eviction, they were evicted; when they swore loyalty to the King Of England, they were loyal; they have always kept their word. And now here is her word. They will be free. She Constance Gore-Booth gives them her word. They will be free.
I have now reached page 31 of a 131-page screenplay. It seems fruitless to continue with historical comparisons, since they are few and far between. Perhaps there is some other dialectic at work here.
It seems to be an account of history written with reference to the melodramas of Dion Boucicault, or springing straight from the pages of Ireland’s Own. In the manner of these heroic tales, it has Collins at the centre of every historical event. Waiting at Howth Harbour with Constance for the arrival of the Asgard. Persuading Tom Barry (before 1916) to join the British army, fight in France, learn the arts of war and continue a rebellion he already knows will be a failure. Collins is present at the signing of the proclamation. Observes wryly the debacle in the GPO, which he describes as “bullshit”. Observes the aftermath, during which a “G” man, Wilson, strips Tom Clarke naked and knees Collins in the groin. The guerilla war proper then begins, with Collins again in all places at once.
The only place Collins does not seem to be is in Westminster, where Churchill and Lloyd George fulminate like characters out of Boucicault at each new success by Collins. Churchill eventually, in desperation, sets up an auxiliary force under the supervision of Constance’s old friend Crake, (who said “Tally- Ho!” so readily), recently returned from the trenches in France. Crake and his auxiliaries meet their match in an epic encounter at the Valley Of The Mouth Of The Flowers with Tom Barry who, it seems, was Crake’s old sergeant on the fields of France, and his flying column. This encounter seems to be based on the battle of Kilmichael and is described in epic terms, complete with wafting smoke, swirling bag-pipes, bayoneted bodies and, oddly enough, Michael Collins. Barry, needless to say, bayonets Crake, who has a cigarette-holder clenched between his militaristic teeth. Collins closes “his single staring eye” after his death.
This epic encounter brings the British finally to their knees. We observe Lloyd George in desperation asking Churchill what to do with this Collins. Churchill observes that as he is Irish, there is only one thing to do. Buy him a drink. Thus begins the Treaty negotiations.
But not before Churchill is seen in conversation with Lady Lavery. He mentions that Collins will be lonely in London, and that the British government would like to know what is on his mind. He says “harumph!”. Lady Lavery enquires as to whether it is her patriotic duty to go to bed with Michael Collins. Churchill turns scarlet and allows her to understand that that indeed is her duty.
Kitty turns up at the Treaty negotiations, as Michael’s secretary. It becomes her fate to wait outside the Lavery household with the files recording the negotiations as Collins lies in bed with Hazel discussing conscience and country. She is restrained from storming the house of “that bitch” by Sean, Collins’s body-guard, who we are to understand is in love with Collins too.
Eventually the Treaty negotiations are concluded. Collins signs as Churchill, Lloyd George and Birkenhead smile. A quote from history enters the script at this point. Collins observes, “I have just signed my own death-warrant” Events from the signing to the Civil War are sketched in deft, broad strokes. Lady Lavery is present at most of them. She observes the debacle of the treaty debates from among the delegates. She accompanies Collins to the hand over of Dublin Castle. She lies in bed with him in the Shelbourne Hotel as the Civil War guns boom and begs him not to go to Cork. But he goes.
Down in the west Cork market town where as a boy he sold the pig, he meets Kitty, who has some intimation of what’s to come and says goodbye to him. Then, in The Valley Of The Mouth Of The Flowers, he is shot by an unseen gunman. But not before bellowing to the valley - “Ireland! Jaysus I love you!”.
WHAT is odd about this script is, given the author’s well-known anti-Nationalist views, how it seems to have sprung from the pages of a Young Ireland pamphlet, or from the Abbey stage of the 1930s under the “Irish Ireland” influence of Ernest Blythe. Its British characters are presented as crude, violent stereotypes, or as cigar-smoking, mustachioed cartoons. Collins, Griffith, Brugha, Childers, De Valera - all the leaders of the Sinn Fein movement seem wrapped in the halo of unsullied idealism. The Volunteers are good-hearted country lads, Cuchullains of the soil, so to speak. Perhaps then, it is a deconstruction of a deconstruction - which ends up with a perfect replica of the form originally deconstructed. Then again, perhaps the dramaturgical talents of Dion Boucicault and the literary qualities of the Young Ireland pamphlets have been unfairly derided over the years and are deserving of imitation in our current, cynical post-modern era. Either way, its relation to history, under any definition of the term, is non-existent.
So there it ends. Not with a very elevated hunch of models, but a beginning nonetheless. And a basis for discussion. Discussion, after all, has to start somewhere.
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An evisceration without being political. Brilliant. That would have hurt Harris far more than challenging his political views
Yes… Exposes Harris for being an awful (and a risibly mawkish) writer. That approach would have hurt.
Mind you, I am no fan of NJ’s films, though he did start off well as a writer with Nights in Tunisia and The Past.
Harris certainly wanted his right of reply. And further makes a clown of himself. Basically hitches his horse to that great intellectual Kevin Costner paying money for his script.
Tally ho: not so funny, Mr Jordan
TALLY HO is right! What else would an Anglo Irish tearaway on a horse shout in 1901? That Neil Jordan finds it funny that the…
EOGHAN HARRIS
Sat, Oct 26, 1996, 01:00
TALLY HO is right! What else would an Anglo Irish tearaway on a horse shout in 1901? That Neil Jordan finds it funny that the young huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ Constance Gore Booth should shout “tally ho” says as much about his sense of Irish social history as the fact that he found a car bomb scene in his film “funny” tells us about his sense of contemporary Irish politics.
And the way David Hanly and Richard Crowley treated themselves to a snicker in studio when it was read out by John S. Doyle tells us plenty about RTE’s politics. Perhaps, like Dr Johnson, they should plead pure ignorance.
“Tally ho” is what screenwriters call a speech tag, like Scarlett O’Hara’s “Fiddle de dee”, or John Wayne’s “That’ll be the day”. In my movie it punctuates the political progress of Constance Gore Booth. The carefree young Constance Gore Booth shouts it as naturally as Fergie until politics takes her breath away.
Commandant Constance Markiewicz of the St Stephen’s Green garrison shouts it as an ironic battle cry to British officers with whom she danced at hunt balls. Constance, the survivor of 1916, now a tired Minister for Labour in the revolutionary Government of Dail Eireann, murmurs it ironically in memory of her former self when she meets Collins.
Finally, in later drafts, Markiewicz, the embittered enragee of the Civil War, spits it ironically at Collins to show they are no longer on the same side - because it would be a shared word between them. Surely David Hanly - if not Richard Crowley - would have heard people like Sean O Riada using the word, as in “What’s the tally ho?” Perhaps he cannot remember it for purposes of this controversy.
Sitting on such a supine nag as RTE, high on a soft saddle of hype, with RTE holding the horse’s nose, it was not surprising that Neil Jordan should spoil his robust response to my criticisms of Michael Collins by a sneering and self serving synopsis of Mick, my screenplay for Kevin Costner.
Since Costner is careful with money, you have to ask why he paid a million dollars for my screenplay and passed on Neil Jordan’s if there is nothing more to it than tally ho.
Most of our media have hyped Michael Collins to high heaven. The other side of that coin is the censorship of any commentary critical of Neil Jordan. For example, no RTE programme has mentioned his extraordinary interview in the Daily Telegraph which was deconstructed by Kevin Myers in this newspaper.
Asked what he now felt about a scene in his film, in which a Belfast Protestant policeman is blown to bits, Neil Jordan said first that he found it funny, and indeed ironic, and later, perhaps feeling that he had been a little too laid back, he changed his mind and said: “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, OK?”
Loyalists are not likely to see the joke. So having knocked down such a heavy hurdle how come the media claim he has a clear round? Let me attempt a personal answer.
THE national question, no matter how hidden, nudges every elbow. Any artefact novel, play or film whose subject is the birth of the State has to take sides on that question. Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster appeals to all audiences, but particularly to pluralists. Terry George’s Some Mothu’s Son which, unlike Michael Collins, is open about its agenda, appeals to republicans.
As the Irish people are Aristotle’s original political animal it is not surprising that they have picked up the politics of Michael Collins from such clues as the car bomb scene, Jordan’s attack on revisionism, his self confessed return to traditional republican values and the fact that Sinn Fein was satisfied with this film.
So it came as no surprise that the coverage of Michael Collins the movie should cause the country to split into two camps. Seeing the movie reinforces rather than changes these prior positions. Republicans will love it, revisionists will loathe it, and people living in Jordanland will purse their lips and say: wasn’t Alan Rickman remarkable.
What I want to say is what I think about his film, and about what he has to say about my screenplay. Let me give the ground rules.
Never did I argue that Neil Jordan’s film had to be historically accurate. He made that claim. For the past 10 years I have said my own film script is a fiction based on the life of Michael Collins. All I ask is that if a writer of an historical film change the facts he or she should be willing to say why they did so.
For my part I am willing to say why I compress dates and have Collins present at almost all major events. And in turn I am asking Neil Jordan to come clean about why he used the car bomb scene which is causing so much anger in the North.
Neil Jordan, in his angry response to Kevin Myers, says: "My film is set in the years 1916-1922 and relates only " That is not so. Michael Collins is a metaphor for some aspects of the armed struggle in the North.
Cinematically there is a constant commentary. The first of these is the car bomb which he told the Daily Telegraph (they did not torture him to say so) he found “funny” and meant to be ironic, and which he now feels was a mistake but has done nothing to remedy.
There are many others: the priest waving a white flag during the Bloody Sunday shootings; the ghost of Gerry Adams is there when Collins asks: “Can you ever see Churchill shaking my hand?” And his disingenuous dismissal of Kevin Myers’s caustic comments founders when he notes in his Film Diary: “things lacking in a story like this: a funeral and a hunger strike.”
The connection between then and now is constantly drawn to our attention: by speech (the fword), by visual style (Dublin workers’ life in flats rather than Georgian houses), by anachronistically callous attitudes to the taking of human life (Dan Breen’s breezy brutality was the exception not the rule), by the casting of so many familiar Northern faces (Stephen Rea’s Northern accent distances us from Dubliner Ned Broy), by the way neither side gives any quarter (an attitude typical of the Provisional IRA but not of the Old IRA - Sean Mac Eoin allowed wounded Auxiliaries to be treated and sent them back to bar racks - and by the director’s desire to make everything look blacker than it was (Connolly being kicked, Croke Park crowds machine gunned) and his self serving statement about the “absolute necessity of the savagery of that time”.
This was a time when Home Rule was on the statute book, offering not much far short of what Collins was forced to settle for.
BUT at the end of the day it is the car bomb scene which sums up everything that concerns me about Michael Collins. Basically, I believe that the scene is like a forensic clue to Neil Jordan’s political agenda - to make an artistic comment, however oblique, on the armed struggle.
There are many movies that could be made on the life of Michael Collins. But none of them can avoid commenting on the armed struggle. The basic choice is between republican Collins in which you play up the bang hangs, and revisionist Collins in which you play up the politician who ran a country from bits of paper in his pocket.
Neil Jordan has given us neither. What he gives us is a Northern Collins, a most modern Collins, a savage Collins, a basically Belfast Collins who deals out death to faceless digits before Jordan bothers to bring them to artistic life in the first place. Had he not made every British officer a sadist and every RIC man a thug it is doubtful that Sinn Fein would be giving it the warm welcome they are giving it all over the world.
Neil Jordan’s screenplay can be summarised simply. After the 1916 Rising Michael Collins gathers a gang and starts taking out the Brits until they pack up and go home. Jordan sacrifices almost everything to that storyline.
Gone is the organisational genius, the man who ran a government out of bits of paper in his pockets. Gone are the Treaty negotiations replaced by a risible caption that says “Four Months Later”. Gone is any real sense of a social revolution - the Labour courts, the War Bonds, the Republican courts.
Gone is the crucible of that revolution the Gaelic League and the literary renaissance which led to the moral power of Terence McSwiney’s hunger strike.
Gone are the girls of Cumann na mBan, the revolution in rural Ireland, the thrilling deeds of Tom Barry, the whole powerful romantic sweep, sweet and bittersweet. of the Irish revolution, as caught by Sean O’Faolin and Frank O’Connor.
So much for Neil Jordan’s Collins. Now for mine. Where Neil Jordan wrote a gangster movie I tried to write Once Upon a Time in Ireland. And I wanted everything that might have helped make Michael Collins to be in it somewhere: Fenianism, Redmondism, life in London, 1913, Yeats, the Abbey, the Asgard. 1916, the Battle of Kilmichael, London again, the Treaty, and the statesman who suppressed those who defied the new democracy.
To do that I had to compress time, move Collins about, but at no time did I deliberately falsify history to make a contemporary point. However tempted I might have been as a revisionist, my Bloody Sunday is bloodier than Neil Jordan’s in the matter of dispatching the spies.
And when I fiddle with a fact I do so to show greater historical truth. To take them in turn: when move a west of Ireland eviction to west Cork it is to show how such fresh folk memories would fill the mind of Michael Collins. When I distort some dates to have him meet Tom Clarke in London, it is to show the ideological continuity of Fenianism on the Irish Volunteers, and to let us see the size of the Empire which they are about to engage.
When I move Markiewicz from Sligo to west Cork it is first for dramatic reasons, so she can be converted to republicanism by Collins, and second to remind us that most rural Irish volunteers were born in the shadow of a Big House.
When I have Collins share an office in London with a Kiplingesque young Englishman, Harry Crake - who will become an amoral auxiliary - I am showing the symbiotic relations between Ireland and Britain and how close Collins was to English life.
When Harry Crake comes to Ireland, a cruel survivor of the Somme and Churchill’s counterrevolutionary force sent to suppress the Bolsheviks, he comes with history in his eyes.
As the lorry leaves Macroom barracks for Kilmichael it is not full of Hollywood digits to be done to death but of men morally maimed by war: “In their dead eyes are many battlefields - Ypres, the Somme, the Russian plains …” When Crake is cut down at Kilmichael his death has a tragic dignity. There’s a huge moral difference between the death of a man and the death of a digit.
Likewise, when I have Collins meet Hazel Lavery in the buff in a bush, it is by way of a blow against the macho culture of Irish nationalism that inspires the lethal laddism of many Neil Jordan movies, and particularly Michael Collins.
THERE are three powerful women in my story - Kitty Kiernan who stands for all the girls of Cumannna mBan who wanted to do their bit for Ireland - but also have a good time; Constance Markiewicz who put a cause above her country; Hazel Lavery, who could have been an agent of Churchill’s but who certainly softened Collins with her sexuality.
Given the have it both ways homoeroticism of his movies, it came as no surprise when Neil Jordan dismissed this wonderful woman as merely “an old bat”. Adult women are absent from his macho cinema. In fact, I reckon that the three strong women’s parts in Mick add up to about 3 million per cent more proper women’s roles than in all of Jordan’s films combined - films where far too often women are acting like men, or actually are.
Finally, I would not disagree with Neil Jordan when he says my screenplay seems to come out of the world of Dion Boucicault and the Young Irelanders. Certainly I see pre 1916 Ireland as a golden age, an age where a vibrant folk culture composed of aisling and Colleen Bawn was still alive.
And I am proud that my script reminded him of Young Ireland, of Thomas Davis and the most inclusive definition of Irish identity ever voiced by Irish Nationalism. “Orange and Green will Carry the Day Boys” they sang. naively but nobly. And I would rather make a Young Ireland movie than a United Ireland movie.
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just to keep the costner link going; harris is now as credible as costner’s accent in robin hood
Beautifully put…
NJ took some scalpel to Harris’ script, which was obviously beyond dire.
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Harris tries to make a virtue out of Costner being tight fisted as a validation for the greatness of ‘Mick’. It was around that time Costner was throwing away his life savings on anything including the flop waterworld.
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The funniest thing about this whole thing is Irish reporters and journalists thinking they are important and set an agenda for modern Ireland.
An incestuous soup of back patting and stabbing.
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Who is this Aoife Moore one, what’s her angle?
She broke the golfgate story last year. She’s not in hoc to FFG so therefore must be a terrorist.
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Terrorist I believe
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