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.
