Cinema: Pugnacious Playwright

Young Cassidy, most of it derived from the late Sean O’Casey’s multi-volume autobiography Mirror in My House, is a shrewd compromise between truth and the blander stuff that makes agreeable popular entertainment. The man himself was a crusty, anticlerical Communist, scarcely the image of a conventional movie hero, though he also happened to be one of the grandest playwrights of the 20th century. Cassidy, filmed in and around Dublin with a wholehearted feel for the gritty poetry of the slums where the author lived and worked at the time of the Troubles, cuts O’Casey down to swallowable size.

As played by Rod Taylor, John Cassidy is a fountainhead of wild Irish charm, a two-fisted brawler whose pursuit of the arts looks rather like typing practice. Now and then, between barroom fights and bedroom bouts, he taps out a masterpiece or two for the Abbey Theatre. But if his escapades are superficial biography, they often come across as stirring, hearty drama.

In the beginning, Cassidy is a simple revolutionary, spitting at the carriage trade while he digs ditches to support his mother (Flora Robson) and sister (Sian Phillips), both doomed to die in genteel poverty. The teakettle warmth of Irish family life simmers comfortably until Director Jack Cardiff plunges into the eye of street fights during the Transport Strike and the bloody Easter Rising of 1916, catching the awful impact of thudding billy clubs, of bullets and bombs and sudden death, letting his camera soak up the slaughter in pitiless detail.

Cassidy’s prize in one melee is a trollop named Daisy Battles, played by tawny, toothsome Julie Christie, who has a decorative role and makes the most of it. But the girl who steals out of O’Casey’s pages into Cassidy’s heart —and gives the whole film a persistent, throbbing pulsebeat—is Nora (Maggie Smith), the shy, strong-minded colleen who finally takes leave of him because “I need a small, simple life—without your terrible dreams and your terrible anger.” Actress Smith makes even reticence seem a powerful emotion.

But Cassidy’s terrible anger may set audiences to sniggering a bit, especially after his unbelievably swift rise in the Irish literary world ruled by Lady Gregory (Dame Edith Evans) and Poet W. B. Yeats (Michael Redgrave). On the riotous opening night of The Plough and the Stars, the historic disturbance inside the Abbey Theatre somehow seems less crucial than the playwright’s muscular performance in the outer lobby, where Taylor enthusiastically flattens a couple of idlers, rounding out Cassidy’s unfinished portrait of the artist as a young tough.