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Director
Jim Sheridan
Credits
Producer: Noel Pearson. Writers: John B. Keane, Jim Sheridan
Principal Cast
Richard Harris, John Hurt, Sean Bean, Brenda Fricker
Category
FeatureClassicLiterature
Jim Sheridan’s second film was an epic tale of land rights and murder. The Field had initially been adapted with Ray McAnally – so wonderful as Mr Brown in My Left Foot – in mind, but the actor’s unexpected death left the role open. In stepped Richard Harris as the Bull McCabe. The rest certainly was history, with Harris thundering through a film that saw John B. Keane’s original stage play transferred from the 1960s to the 1930s and the figure of the outsider/property speculator altered from a returning British-Irish immigrant to a Yank. With echoes of Yeats’ Cuchulainn from ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and, in his final madness, King Lear, the film re-imagined the Irish past as Oedipal tragedy. Critics and audiences alike were shocked, some horrified by Sheridan’s bleak view of the West, with its mean-spirited natives and murderous patriarchs. Certainly the bucolic days of The Quiet Man were over.
Notes by Ruth Barton.
110 minutes, Ireland/UK, 1990, Colour
ALL YOU NEED IS DEATH 13:30, 18:30 (Q&A)
BALTIMORE 16:00
IO CAPITANO 20:30
JEANNE DU BARRY 15:50, 20:45
ON THE WATERFRONT 70TH ANNIVERSARY 13:40
PERFECT DAYS 13:00, 18:00
THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE 15:40, 20:55
THE ZONE OF INTEREST 18:10
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