Johnny Nobody

The addition of Talking Pictures in recent years for UK and Ireland has given a platform to show many forgotten films including B features, a concept probably alien to anyone under 70, due to the format coming to an end at the 1950s.

This 1961 film is a throw back to this era. While Talking Pictures continues to unearth some gems, this sadly isn't one of them. It uses a typical UK and Irish production model of the time, to bring in an American face and plant them into the plot however odd that may seem, given the setting. Probably easier to get the film funded if through the addition of a US performer, it gives the producers the opportunity to have the finished product break into the more lucrative US market.

Here we get not one but two. While William Bendix and Aldo Ray weren't actual A listers they were reasonably well known due to audiences. Neither get much screen time and one comes away thinking they filmed their scenes over a few days while they were holidaying in Ireland.

Filmed at Ardmore in Wicklow with some filming in Dublin, and in what appears to be a local village, it at times looks like an attempt to play on the charm of John Ford's The Quiet Man, although at a minute level of that film's funding and production values. Priests, pub, comedy, Irish setting, hapless police, and the inevitable chase.

There are some of the usual Irish faces of the time, each offering up a cameo. Cyril Cusack, Niall MacGinnis, Noel Purcell, Eddie Byrne. Joe Lynch does a turn as a friendly traveler and even gets to warble through a ballad as he comes to the aid of our hapless hero, a local priest played by Nigel Patrick, who also directed.

A totally unbelievable plot and added to Patrick, there are other English actors, Yvonne Mitchell and Bernie Winters, who seem very out of place. You'd think their roles would have been better performed by other local actors, but like Bendix and Ray, perhaps a sop to British audiences. Winters, along with his brother, were a comedy act duo of the time. This is one of his handful of film appearances, and again, it's just a cameo.

As other have highlighted, the ending should be up for an award. One gets the feeling they just ran out of money and they had to wrap it up.

There's a terrific idea at the heart of this Irish-set thriller, particularly if you're a Catholic. A drunken Irish-American atheist stands outside a Roman Catholic Church in a small Irish village and defies God to strike him dead when out of nowhere a stranger appears and does just that in front of the local priest and the whole village. Since the killer doesn't appear to have a past or an identity, he becomes known as "Johnny Nobody", hence the film's title.

So far so good; unfortunately we get the denouement about two-thirds of the way through and it's not a very good one. From here on things get progressively more far-fetched, like a cross between a poor man's "The 39 Steps" and "Witness for the Prosecution".

Actor Nigel Patrick both directs and plays the sceptical priest, Aldo Ray is the killer and a really rather good William Bendix, the victim. Others in the cast include a miscast Yvonne Mitchell, Cyril Cusack and Niall Macginnis as well as the usual stock company of Irish players. On its level it's entertaining matinee fare but it could have been so much better.

Bizarrely-plotted British drama with religious overtones. Set in a small southern Irish village, it starts off dramatically with William Bendix's character, a successful author, hauling himself down to the local bar where he offends the highly religious locals by loudly proclaiming his atheism to all and sundry. Someone sends for the village priest, Nigel Patrick, who attempts to calm down the blasphemer, but now riled even more, he defiantly dares God to strike him down on the spot, if He indeed exists. Cue Aldo Ray as "Johnny Nobody", who promptly steps up to shoot him, claiming amnesia and proclaiming that he was divinely inspired to do the deed.

At the ensuing trial, there's a sensation when Patrick's priest is asked on the witness stand if God could indeed have divinely intervened, causing an adjournment as the trial erupts in uproar, with it seems all the locals, including by extension, the jury, buying into the "God made me do it" defence of the accused. Taking a particularly keen interest in the case is a local female journalist Yvonne Mitchell who seems especially interested in the evidence Patrick will give when the court resumes after the weekend. But Patrick suspects there's more to this than meets the eye and decides to use the intervening 48 hours to follow up a lead arising from cryptic postcards containing Biblical quotations sent to his office, no doubt to try to influence his upcoming testimony. This leads him to a small country village and a number of scrapes, including a revelatory re-encounter with Mitchell, a run-in with a band of traveling folk and the local police on his tail as he then races back to the conclusion of the trial, where God seems to have the last word after all, or does he...?

I was intrigued by the initial premise, right up to the breakdown in the court trial, thinking the film might either continue on with a deep debate into the existence of God, like a sort of serious version of "The Man Who Sued God" or instead go the full mystery-adventure route like a good episode of later TV series like "The Avengers" or "Department S' but no such luck either way. Rather, Patrick escapes to the country to do some Father Brown-type sleuthing as the film lapses into an adventure caper, including an unlikely attempt at murder involving a galloping race-horse which makes you wonder why the perpetrator didn't just run him down in a car and the good father boarding a speeding train like that Bond fellow. As for the shocking conclusion, no doubt designed to make the contemporary viewer scratch their head and think "Well, maybe...", I must admit I found it hilariously preposterous.

Actor Patrick directs himself here, but with no real flair or imagination as he lets the story lead his camerawork and while the lead performances are all just about okay, the movie was too implausible and disjointed to do anything other than amuse me, which I know wasn't the aim.

JOHNNY NOBODY is a strange little movie that doesn't really gel all that well, although it proves to be quite entertaining at times. It begins with a bizarre set-piece in which an atheist rants and raves in an Irish pub, understandably upsetting the punters, before a random stranger executes him. The focus then shifts to priest Nigel Patrick (who also directs) as he investigates the killer's motives for his crime. The latter half adopts a kind of preposterous 'wronged man' template with some good suspense scenes that are the best part of the film, but then we get a ridiculous climax that must have been laughed off the screen by audiences of the era.

William Bendix gives another brilliant performance as a blasphemer. Aldo Ray performs in a strange and unique role. The conclusion of the film may not come close to Dietrich-Laughton in "Witness for the Prosecution", but one could see a comparison with the original "Bad Seed"