ALTHOUGH THE last decade has undoubtedly witnessed a renaissance of sorts in Irish cinema, kick-started by the critical and commercial successes of the films of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, there is every reason to believe that the best is yet to come.
The General, veteran director John Boorman's astonishing biopic of the charismatic Dublin crime-lord Martin Cahill, premieres this week, and looks certain to receive far more worldwide attention and critical acclaim than any Irish film before it. When unveiled at last week's Cannes Film Festival, it received glowing reactions from all and sundry, bagged Best Director award and only narrowly missed out on the enormously coveted Palme d'Or.
It's not hard to see why it's made such a splash: The General (based loosely on the events documented in Sunday World crime reporter Paul Williams' biography) is a stunning and deeply moving achievement. Its anti-hero is one of the most compelling and fascinating characters ever to grace a screen, and it seems entirely reasonable to expect that the film will achieve the status of cult immortality, although the Dublin vernacular in which most of the dialogue is delivered might be rather perplexing to Stateside audiences.
On the other hand, given current trends, there is every prospect that Dublin might even come to rival Chicago and New York as the crime-flick capital of the world. If the notion sounds far-fetched, consider this: The General is merely the first of three films attempting to chronicle Cahill's life, and follows hard on the heels of similarly-themed projects such as Paddy Breathnach's gangster comedy I Went Down and Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Nothing Personal. There are also several films in the pipeline about the extraordinary life and violent death of Veronica Guerin, and with even RTE doing their bit (courtesy of last year's excellent cop-shop mini-series Making The Cut), it seems that the seismic recent changes in the methods and patterns of Irish criminal life are now beginning to be reflected in a veritable glut of movie projects.
Future generations, as they stroll down to the multiplex to choose between The Penguin III, Revenge Of The Monk and The Tosser Strikes Again, will probably wonder how we ever managed to survive the '90s. However, as most of us can testify, it is in fact still relatively safe to walk the streets of Dublin without a bullet-proof vest, nor is it strictly necessary to move around on all fours. In other words, there is no crimewave in Ireland, except the one that exists in the collective public imagination, their legitimate fears bloated by a diet of hysterical Evening Herald headlines. Nevertheless, there's no denying that the country's burgeoning criminal underworld has made a huge impact on the public, and no-one personified this more than the late Martin Cahill.
In case you've been asleep for the last 15 years, Cahill was the pre-eminent Irish criminal of his generation, a man who gradually attained living-legend status and no small measure of public affection with an extraordinary sequence of audacious capers that succeeded in making the Gardaí look like the incompetent idiots they pride themselves on not being. A self-styled sort of Robin Hood figure (at least in his own mind), Cahill derived little personal enrichment from his criminal enterprises, preferring to live a relatively frugal life, abstaining from drink and drugs, and cultivating a love of pigeons and motorbikes. It hardly needs to be said that he was also a profoundly ruthless and vicious individual who ruled his little world through the judicious use of terror.
It's fair to say that few men have ever polarised reactions the way Martin Cahill did. The nation's police, politicians and newspaper editors despised him with a venom that knew no bounds: he personified, in those eyes, all that was unacceptable about modern Ireland. The general public's attitude to Cahill, however, was profoundly ambivalent, a mixture of outrage and sympathy in which the hesitation of the inevitable "but" played an enormous part: we knew him to be incontrovertibly a scumbag, but you had to love the way he ran rings around the cops and the sheer style with which he carried it off.
If the Director of Public Prosecutions was preparing a criminal case against him, he would break into the DPP's office and steal the files. If he needed weapons to prosecute a robbery, he was given to liberating them from the Gardaí's own arsenal. He once robbed his own Labour Exchange of #100,000 on the same day that he collected his dole money from its office. He remained up to his neck in various criminal activities until his dying day, with a blithe disregard for the 90-man police task force assigned to monitor his movements morning, noon and night. He lived with his wife and sister-in-law, fathering children with both of them and apparently maintaining perfectly harmonious relationships with both women. He wasn't your average thug by any stretch of the imagination.
The best explanation for Cahill's extraordinary public popularity is that he exemplified, in extreme form, the spirited lawlessness and contempt for authority that largely defines the Irish people. It's a viewpoint that John Boorman largely concurs with.
"You couldn't live in Ireland in the '80s without being aware of the man," says the 65-year-old director, who's lived in Co. Wicklow for the past 30 years. "The public fascination with Cahill, and my own, probably drew on something archetypal from the deep past - a relish and envy for the freedom of one who dares to defy the might of society. It brought to mind those Irish gang bosses in Chicago; they came out of the same mould as Cahill. The popular appeal of The Godfather was that it offered a tribal social structure, rather than the frustrating complexities of a modern democracy. Only a few hundred years back we were all living in tribes, and emotionally, we've hardly graduated from that condition."
While The General purports to offer a balanced picture of Cahill's life, no-one who watches it can deny that he emerges as a broadly sympathetic character. Brendan Gleeson's central performance is a tour de force of warmth, wit, charisma and charm, and the General we see in the film is essentially a lovable rogue with a kindly, avuncular manner and an irrepressibly cheerful spirit.
In contrast, the grimmer side of Cahill is only dwelt on briefly, in a stomach-churning torture scene where he nails a suspected traitor to a pool table, crucifixion-style. Therefore, it's hard not to concur that Boorman does indeed glamorise Cahill, and even viewers who appreciate the film's brilliance might find this approach distinctly disconcerting, a moral flaw rather than an artistic one.
Boorman, however, vigorously maintains that The General was by no means an attempt to sanitise Cahill. "We were determined not to flinch from showing his ruthless brutality as well as his wit and cleverness. I hoped that the audience would recoil, and find him unsympathetic - but interesting, and fascinating. Nor did we want it to be like Scarface, where the audience is somehow invited to enjoy the sadism. We agreed that we should unflinchingly tell the truth about him. We would be careful not to appeal to audience sympathy, and to show the beastliness without relish or decoration."
For all that, though, the director and Brendan Gleeson both concede that, of necessity, they had to use a degree of dramatic license in their interpretation of Cahill's complex character, not to mention that of his associates and his women.
"As I shaped the material," explains Boorman, "I had to decide how the characters spoke, how they related to each other, their preoccupations. The gang members were shadowy enough, so I simply invented a group of characters and gave them the names of people in my village. Cahill himself had sprung to life on the pages (of Paul Williams' book): I had heard his voice, I knew his wiles. Frances Cahill and her sister Tina were a more difficult problem. They were not involved in criminal activities. Did I have the right to depict them, and in what light? I considered contacting them, but Paul Williams advised against it - he said they would refuse contact with anyone outside their world. So, largely, this was to be a fiction based on fact. The frameworks, of course, would be built of incidents that occurred, but beyond that, I would rely on what Wilde called the truth of the imagination."
Boorman is fully prepared for the backlash that, inevitably, is already beginning to ensue from those sections of the media who - while more than willing to milk the movie's success for all the column inches they can muster - cannot stomach the prospect of The General bestowing posthumous legitimacy on the activities of a man they spent a decade railing against. The director encountered this problem well before the film even went into production.
"An unscrupulous journalist on the Sunday Times procured a copy of the script and wrote a piece accusing me of glamorising violence and torture. It was the first time I'd had a film reviewed before it was made. The Irish tabloids picked up the story and began running fabricated versions, with allegations like 'People's lives were being threatened if they took jobs on the movie'. 'We were victims of unimaginable intimidation' - all this was totally untrue, but the stories were creating huge difficulties. It was proving difficult to secure locations - owners were afraid of being burned or bombed, or worse. Anyway, our lawyers wrote to all the papers threatening legal action if they persisted in printing false and unsubstantiated stories. It quietened them down.'
The casting of Brendan Gleeson (a little-known actor out-side his native land) in the lead role in preference to more bankable candidates like Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson has been described in some quarters as an enormous gamble - quite insultingly, for, as anyone who has followed Gleeson's career to date can testify, he is an actor of breathtaking range and versatility. The General marks the zenith of his career thus far, and Gleeson plays the Cahill role to perfection, assisted to some degree by his startling physical resemblance to his subject. It will almost certainly catapult him into the international A-list, and not before time: he recently observed to RTE Guide that "it's taken a good while before people will trust me to carry a film".
Boorman, for his part, was never in any doubt that the man he has dubbed "one of the most important actors of his generation" was ideal for the part.
"When I was looking for money to make the film, people liked the script and they said 'look, if you find yourself a star, we'll give you the money.' Everyone wanted a star, but there was never any alternative for me. Somehow it's as if Brendan was born to play this role."
While Gleeson's towering central performance will be talked about for months to come, possibly the real revelation of The General is Jon Voight's superb turn as Inspector Ned Kenny, a character based largely on real-life cop Gerry O'Carroll, who had the thankless task of trying to ensnare the untouchable Cahill. In the course of the film, Voight keeps up a flawless Kerry accent and an extraordinary resemblance in mannerisms to the Irish country-born cop, aided by O'Carroll's considerable assistance.
"He (O'Carroll) was one of several policeman who had hunted down Cahill," says Boorman. "He knew him well, knew the members of his gang, knew his family. I spent hours talking with him, and he gave me fresh insight into the character: like most of Dublin's police, he was from the country. For a long time, it has been Gardai policy to police districts with men from elsewhere - and as a result, Dublin policemen are often lonely and isolated and dependent on each other for social comfort. They feel under siege from a hostile community, particularly in rougher sections. This wasn't the case with Gerry: he has a warm, but intimidating, power that gains him friends and respect. He is famed for venturing alone into no-go areas with impunity.
"I introduced Jon to Gerry, and they became inseparable. Jon was soon talking with Gerry's accent as they toured the streets and police stations. Jon sat in on interrogations, he listened entranced to Gerry's stories, and he insisted that Gerry be present when he shot his scenes to correct any slips. Gerry complied. It emerged that he was a serious movie-buff."
Given that the General's cronies were hardly going to grant explicit authorisation for the film to be made - and that an altogether more vicious breed of thug had stepped into the vacuum left by Cahill's death - the possibility of violent retaliation from elements of the criminal fraternity could not afford to be dismissed, so O'Carroll's assistance was needed.
"I was concerned about security," admits the director, "which was why I sought Gerry's advice. The set would have a pair of armed policemen. My house and Brendan's would be carefully watched. But most of all, he would rely on the good will of criminals to whom he had given a fair shake in the past to inform him if there was mischief afoot. And he briefed me on the current gangland situation in Dublin.
"After the shock of the Veronica Guerin assassination, there was suddenly the political will to do something about the situation. A drastic bill was rushed into law, which gave the police enormous powers to confiscate the property of suspected drug dealers, and the police were issued with modern automatic weapons, and a wholescale assault on the gangs was mounted. As a result, the criminals were soon in full retreat, skulking in Spain or Miami, waiting for the heat to cool before they returned. War had also broken out between the gangs that remained, and they could be relied upon to kill each other at regular intervals. In the light of all this, Gerry felt we had a good chance of being left alone.
"Legally, the situation was a bit more tricky: before insurance would give us cover, they wanted to be absolutely certain that there were no errors, that no-one could sue for libel or defamation or plagiarism or anything else. The dead can't sue, so we were safe with Cahill and the several members of his gang who had succumbed to drug overdoses or come to sticky ends. It was thought that even if some criminals claimed to recognise themselves, it would be difficult for them to sue for defamation - unless they felt I had depicted them too mildly and thus damaged their reputation for ferocity. I had to make sure that Frances and Tina were not seen to be privy to any criminal acts - and, most importantly, that no lawyer, judge or policeman could recognise himself. The most litigious people are those whose business is the law.
"In the end," he grins ruefully, "I was forced to make a hundred little nips and tucks, dulling some of my sharpest lines. There was one particularly good epigram I put in the mouth of a judge which turned out to be exactly what a certain judge had said. I regretted losing that one."
Boorman's film takes the unusual and daring option of using the final act of Cahill's life as the opening scene of his biopic: The General commences with him emerging from his Rathmines home, to be blown away moments later by a hail of bullets from an IRA gunman, before "rewinding" sharply all the way back to his childhood.
Boorman says he chose to use Cahill's assassination as the first scene "so that this knowledge would then cast a shadow across the rest of the movie. His life, his hardships and his despicable acts would assume, I hoped, a tragic dimension. I know it's often cynically said that Hollywood likes tragedies with a happy ending, but this had to be truly tragic. This film is pure tragedy: the tragedy of a bad man who could have been good, could have lived, could have known greatness." n
* The General goes on, eh, general release across the country on Fri 29th May. See review in Blow Up elsewhere in this issue.