Juno and the Paycock

Sean O'Casey's controversial stage play about a shanty Irish family caught up in the times of Ireland's fight for independence get's a rough going over in this Alfred Hitchcock screen adaptation. With it's primitive soundtrack O'Casey's eloquence and dark wit is often garbled and indecipherable. Master of suspense Hitchcock seems content to just film the stage play with about half a dozen set ups and few camera movements. Performance wise he enlists stage vets from The Vic and The Abbey who en masse chew the scenery to pieces. Trained to reach the audience in the rear of the balcony the players are ill suited to the nuance required in this new art form and they remain over the top from start to finish.

Hitch does display flashes of brilliance with the new medium of sound in a couple of scenes involving the informer family member wracked with guilt and paranoia but for the most part he plays it safe, allowing his thespians to recite O'Casey's lyrical dialogue which technical bugs trample.

Dated as it may be Juno and the Paycock performed on stage can be a powerful theatre going experience with its memorable characters and well balanced tragi-comic theme that rails against social hypocrisy. I'm not sure a "sophisticated" film version today would do the play the justice that it receives's within the intimacy of the stage where one gets the feeling your sitting in the Boyles parlor. Suffice to say the 1929 version leaves you in the basement looking for a light switch.

After filming a few bits on the revue musical Elstree Calling, Alfred Hitchcock's next full feature directing job was on this terrible adaptation of Sean O'Casey's popular play. A long-suffering Irish family struggles to get by during the Irish Civil War. Matriarch "Juno" (Sara Allgood, who had played the role on the stage as well) tries to get layabout drunk husband Captain Boyle (Edward Chapman), whom she refers to as the "Paycock" (peacock) due to his strutting vanity, to find work to help support the family, which includes daughter Mary (Kathleen O'Regan), a worker on strike, and son Johnny (John Laurie), a former IRA fighter left bitter and resentful after an injury resulted in the loss of an arm. When the Captain learns that he's come into a generous inheritance, the family thinks that their fortunes may have finally brightened, only for tragedy to occur. Also featuring Marie O'Neill, Sidney Morgan, Dave Morris, and John Longden (the policeman boyfriend from Blackmail).

I'm not familiar with O'Casey's play, but if this film is an indication, it's awful. Hitchcock made the conscious decision to abstain from any cinematic style, and attempted to present this as a largely static filmed play, rendering the already-tedious proceedings even more unbearable. Allgood isn't bad, but the rest of the cast is forgettable at best. The original play had starred Barry Fitzgerald as the Captain, and he makes his film debut here as a speech-making rabble-rouser at the movie's start. Perhaps Hitchcock thought that Barry's Nosferatu-with-a-bad-wig look wasn't camera-friendly enough to reprise his lead role. This is definitely my least favorite Hitchcock film.

Juno and the Paycock is very much like Sean O'Casey's other filmed work, The Plough and the Stars. Both plays are centered on typical Irish families in Dublin trying to survive in times of strife. Plough and the Stars takes place during the Easter Rebellion and Juno and the Paycock takes place during the Civil War after the British leave everything but Ulster.

The Boyle family who are the protagonists are not the noblest clan ever put on film, but I think a lot of us would recognize ourselves more than we care to admit. Sara Allgood is mother Boyle, nicknamed Juno who bears all kinds of tribulations for the 90 minutes of the film. She has one useless husband who'd spend all his time in the pub if he could, a son who's an amputee lost in the fighting, and a daughter who gets taken in my an English solicitor who brings news of an inheritance and then takes advantage of the daughter.

Sean O'Casey got good and slammed after these two plays were produced, showing a side of Irish life that wasn't pleasant. Today they are masterpieces.

Juno and the Paycock could probably use a more modern production now. This was one of Alfred Hitchcock's earliest sound features, but it really is a photographed stage play for the most part. When John Ford did The Plough and the Stars he very cleverly cut in a lot of newsreel footage from the Easter Rebellion giving a real feeling for the times.

What Ford did and what Hitchcock didn't do was inject typical John Ford touches in the film so it is more Ford and O'Casey. Hitchcock was hardly as well known in 1930 as opposed to the reputation he later developed. The Hitchcock touches that we all later came to know are hardly present here. In fact this really isn't a Hitchcock kind of film at all. But he did it as a contractual obligation.

Because it wasn't his kind of film, Hitchcock dismissed it. But the film is definitely true to what O'Casey was trying to convey.

Sean O'Casey's play does not translate to the screen very well. A bit talky, it may have worked fine on stage, but it is not movie material. Still Hitchcock has moments where he shows his genius as a filmmaker. There are camera shots and editing cuts that tell more of the story than any of O'Casey's dialog.

Still, I would not recommend this film for anyone who is new to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Save this one for the advance class, and let the beginners view "The Secret Agent," "Shadow of a Doubt," "Vertigo," and "Psycho," just to name a few.

Having been a Hitchcock fan for forty years I have not been able to see this until now, thanks to a very cheap and poor quality DVD.

This straightforward fill of Sean O'Casey's play turns out to be a powerful piece of admittedly primitive early film-making. This is from a time when sound editing was impossible - scenes had to be taken in long takes with four cameras and cut ins added in - very much like studio TV.

I am shocked that one reviewer refers to bad photography with heads cut off. That's the bad transfer on the disc which cuts quite a lot of the image, often cutting of heads. If we could see a good print this would be powerful stuff with, surprisingly, a lot of very strong Hitchcock moments - including a ma in atrench coat waiting in the street - to execute JOhnny who was betrayed his republican group. It's also an extraordinarily authentic picture of an intensely catholic world. Ireland is still suffering from internal fighting but the is celebrating independence - but at the same time these people suffer from extreme judgemental attitudes. The rejection of the pregnant daughter by her previous boyfriend is simple and chilling.

We desperately need restorations of Hitchcock's pre 1934 films. The silents are excellent when you see them pristine. The copies in circulation are only hints of what they are really like. In its way a key work in Hitchcock's oeuvre. He may have dismissed it in the TRuffaut interviews, but take that with a pinch of salt. He avoids any mention of Fritz Lang influence too - and yet if you see Spione, M, or the Mabuse films you see how much he owed to Lang.