How the Western Was No. 1
Eugene O'Brien remembers a childhood spent watching Westerns on the big screen.

If I had been born American or French or, well, any other nationality I would probably have had a very good sense of my own country from watching films. But I was born in Ireland and so my sense of being Irish when I was growing up came from history class and the eight hundred years of oppression, and struggling with the language (Deanamh Mamaí na ceaparí), watching Ireland in the Eurovision and in sport, pre-Jack Charlton and so on... I certainly got no sense of it from going to the local cinema in Edenderry every Saturday matinee during the seventies. Situated on the corner of the town square, the place was a portal into another world. We saw James Bond films, Disney films, and all sorts of ‘family’ movies. When none of these ‘suitable’ films were available we saw tough thrillers and, our favorite, Westerns with high body counts. The Dollars trilogy [Photo left: For a Few Dollars More], late John Wayne movies – ‘Fill your hands, you son of a bitch’ – and the one that stirred me the most and smacked me in the gob – The Wild Bunch. The children with the scorpions and ants at the beginning burned into my nine-year-old consciousness along with the memory of us all racing from the cinema afterwards, dying in slow motion across the square.

It wasn’t only the kids who seemed to have a special kinship with the Western. Every Monday night, a group of men would go to see Westerns. This was in the seventies pre-video era, when films did the rounds again and again, and Monday night was Western night. These men had stayed behind while others emigrated, but still dreamed of wide-open spaces and heading forever west, where men ruled, and codes of morality and honor were clear cut. Indeed this tradition continued until the early eighties when the Westerns stopped making the rounds. When Diva turned up instead one Monday night the cinema manager was asked ‘What’s all the fuckin’ writin’ doin’ up on the screen?’

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 121.