DIR: John Boorman • WRI: John Boorman, Paul Williams •PROD: John Boorman • DOP: Seamus Deasy • ED: Ron Davis • DES: Derek Wallace • CAST: Brendan Gleeson, Jon Voight, Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball.
The General will be generally referred to as a black-and-white film. In reality, that's not what it is at all. It's in monochrome, a range of greys. I mean, literally – this is not a metaphor. The film was shot in colour but will be released in monochrome, which leaves the option of a colour video release, in order, I assume, to hedge the investors' bets, since B/W is currently seen as box-office poison. This compromise seems to me in some way to sum up the problems that exist in this admirable film.
I should state here that the day before I saw The General was spent watching GoodFellas and soaking up the wit and wisdom of Martin Scorsese. This juxtaposition is a particularly unfair one that would benefit very few filmmakers. The fact, however, remains, that if you make a gangster movie you're coming up against some pretty tough opposition.
Boorman, I think, is well aware of this. The Warners logo, magnificently grey and black, opens the film with a ready-made allusion to Scarface, Public Enemy and so on. It gave me a real shiver of anticipation, knowing that I was about to see the first real Irish contribution to the genre that has driven cinema right from the beginning, and that it was directed by the man whose meditation on violence – Point Blank, Deliverance – get right under the skin. The film itself opens with the execution of Martin Cahill (strangely relocated from a busy intersection to the driveway of his house) and then rolls time back to show us Cahill's enigmatic smile in the moment when he realises his death is inevitable. The rest of the film, copping a plot device from Hemingway's story, and Don Siegel's film, The Killers, seems to be an attempt to explain that smile.
The film has many excellent sequences, and Boorman's script shows a flair, which he has never previously displayed, for naturalistic, often hilarious dialogue. An early sequence establishes Cahill's intransigence and his ability to use society's rules against it by showing his refusal to leave the flat where he grew up. Even after the entire block is demolished, he persists, pitching a tent on the rubble. Eventually despairing, the Council gives in to his demand for a flat in Rathmines – 'so I can be near me work'. The combination of intense territoriality and clever, unpredictable tactics is what defines the rest of Cahill's career, so the scene is structurally valuable as well as extremely funny.
This clarity of intent isn't really visible in the remainder of the film, however. For the most part, Boorman concentrates on crowd-pleasing stuff – Cahill outwitting the cops, over and over again – without ever really developing a strong storyline. He is interested in the Gardai and their hapless, flailing attempts to run Cahill in. There's the obligatory decent cop, who – in other circumstances – might have been Cahill's friend... you know the sort of thing. He's well played by Jon Voight, but it's a very perfunctory role, which makes no contribution to the story beyonds the purely schematic one of providing a foil for Gleeson's charismatic lead. He seems to play no active part in Cahill's downfall. In fact, he doesn't do anything much.
The story's other strand, Cahill's reckless feud wiht the IRA and their determination to take him off the board, is strangely muffled. There's no sense that he's in any real danger from the two low-key scenes where the Provos feature, though one of them – unmistakably implying a link between Concerned Parents Against Drugs and the IRA – is certainly going to piss some people off. Perhaps the filmmakers shield away from depicting the Provos as a power in the land equal to, or greater than, our elected represntatives?
Since the Gardai can't stop Cahill, it's left to the Provos to finish things. The fact that their interests are, in this case, identical, is an interesting one, which the film, surprisingly, fails to examine. Cahill's relationship with the larger criminal society would seem to be analogous with Johnny Boy's relationship with the Mob in Mean Streets – he's a troublesome, crazy individual who makes things difficult for everybody with his antics. The film stands back from this larger context, leaving only the 'ordinary decent criminal', the jolly fat man with his unusual domestic arrangements and a schoolboyish propensity for giving the finger to the world. Cahill may have been all of those things, but he was a lot more. A lot more frightening.
The episodic nature of the story makes it feel like a long two hours, despite the fact that many of the individual scenes are highly entertaining. The main difficulty, however, is that Martin Cahill's character seems to be a puzzle to the director. It seems as if he couldn't figure out how to portray Cahill's professional, dispassionate violence without completely alienating the audience from the movie's ostensible here. The result is that the scenes of violence don't tie up successfully with the scenes showing Cahill as the cheeky chappie, the people's here. A fictionalised version of the story might have had fewer difficulties. The qualities that make Cahill and interesting movie 'hero' – his intelligence, crazy sense of humour, the two 'wives', etc. – come hand in hand with his ruthless ability to nail a man down with a hammer. The two mutually contradictory elements are never reconciled within the film, because they aren't reconciled in the script, because the writer/director is himself unable to reconcile them. I believe that Boorman, on some level, just doesn't like Cahill in the way that the film asks us to like him. More damagingly, he can't come up with a dramatic construct through which the audience can like him. Maybe that doesn't interest him.
Whatever else about The General, though, it is tremendously refreshing to see a film deal with the everyday realities of Irish criminal and political life. In the year of the 'blue flu', Boorman's treatment of our police force is no more that they deserve.
Paul Duane – Film Ireland 65 (June/July 1998)
