BEFORE HE embarked on a career as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock made a film version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. It was well received at the time (1930), although fidelity to the stage original made it a talkie in every sense.
In any case the playwright liked it well enough to discuss other projects with the film director, even if they never came to pass.
O’Casey may have changed his mind about the movie in later years. The former film-maker and archivist Liam O’Leary once recalled him refusing permission for a screening at Britain’s National Film Theatre. “Mr O’Casey would be pleased if you took this film and burned it in the nearest ashcan,” O’Leary was told. “In no way will Mr O’Casey give his permission for this dreadful film to be shown.” Its incineration then would not have been a first, in fact. Republicans in Limerick burned it on its debut, angry at Hitchcock’s (or O’Casey’s) portrayal of Ireland.
His experience with the play had at least one echo in Hitchcock's later career. This occurs in The Birds(1963), when a drunk raises his glass and declares: "It's the end of the world." Hitchcock told his biographer and fellow film-maker François Truffaut that the doomsayer was "like an O'Casey character". Some critics have suggested it was O'Casey himself.
Apart from Juno, Hitchcock's Irish roots were a well hidden influence during his lifetime, even though he had them on both sides. His mother was Emma Jane Whelan, the daughter of a Liverpool policeman, and his paternal grandmother was a Mahony.
The milieu also extended to his education, courtesy of the Jesuits in St Ignatius College, Middlesex, where his contemporaries included one Reginald Dunne.
As the IRA’s London commandant, Dunne would play an inadvertently pivotal role in the Irish Civil War. In June 1922, he and Joseph O’Sullivan assassinated Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on his doorstep. Both gunmen were veterans of the first World War.
Indeed O’Sullivan had lost a leg at Ypres, a fact that contributed to their capture and subsequent hanging.
And although they were probably acting on orders from Michael Collins – one version is that he gave the order during negotiations on the Treaty and then forgot to rescind it – an indirect result was increased British pressure on Collins to confront anti-Treaty forces in the Four Courts. He did, and it precipitated all-out war.
The Catholicism certainly left its mark on Hitchcock, most famously in Vertigo, with its bell-tower, nuns, and guilt. Whether Ireland was a separately important factor might be material for a thesis. There probably have been a few such attempts.
But he himself doesn’t appear to have discussed it much. In a Hitchcock-style biopic, his Irish roots might be only the “MacGuffin”(his word for the plot device that drives a film along while being of no particular significance).
Hitchcock did make another film with a sort-of Irish theme, and it was not a happy experience. In Under Capricorn(1949), he directed Ingrid Bergman as Lady Henrietta Flusky, the Irish (and drunken) wife of an ex-convict in 1830s Australia. The film was a costume drama and love story, rather than a thriller, which probably explains its abject failure. It lost so much money it was repossessed by the bank.
Hitchcock's golden period only began a few years later, with Rear Windowin 1954, and it arguably ended with Psychoin 1960. Among the intervening masterpieces was North By Northwest(1959), the stylish comedy thriller released 50 years ago this summer. The plot-driver in North by Northwestis government secrets – a standard MacGuffin – of which Cary Grant is mistakenly assumed to be in possession as he is chased across the US.
En route he and Eva Marie Saint have time for a famous tryst on a sleeper train. The classic set-piece of a classic film is the nine-minute scene in which Grant finds himself in the middle of vast empty prairie, where nothing seems to be happening, at length, until suddenly a crop-dusting plane attempts to eradicate him with weed-killer.
WHAT HITCHCOCK FILMS are not so well remembered for is the music: a single, repeated note in Psycho being the exception that proves the rule. Despite the time and thought put into them, soundtracks tend to be overshadowed by the powerful visuals.
But a recent trend towards live orchestral accompaniments of film screenings is attempting to redress this.
The trick has already been performed with the Wizard of Ozand, in Gotta Dance, with a compilation of Hollywood best song and dance scenes. And this coming Saturday at the National Concert Hall, Hitchcock gets the treatment when the RTÉ Concert Orchestra provides live accompaniment to extracts from his greatest films.
Titles featured will include To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, and Dial M for Murder. And to mark its 50th birthday, Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for North by Northwestwill also star, with the orchestra breathing new musical life into Grant's drunk driving scene and the Mount Rushmore sequence, among others. Nervous orchestral fans can relax, however. The shower scene from Psychois not scheduled to feature, only the overture.
Hitchcock – Dial M for Murderis at the National Concert Hall on June 20th, in a matinee performance at 3.30pm and again at 8pm. Booking: 01-4170000.