straightening up the quare
by
Douglas Messerli
Arthur
Dreifuss and Jacqueline Sundstrom (screenplay, based on the play by Brendan
Behan), Arthur Dreifuss (director) The
Quare Fellow / 1962
I
have wanting to see the film version of Brendan Behan’s first play, The Quare Fellow for many years now, and
finally ordered it through my subscription through Netflix. In part, I wanted to catch a glimpse, at
least, of a play by a writer of the 1950s at a time of my extensive theater
readings of Ionesco, Pinter, and Albee, whom I had failed to read. I suppose to
my young 14-16 year-old mind, a drunken Irishman, no matter how good a writer,
was simply not of interest to me. How little did I know!
Accordingly, I was delighted to finally
have the opportunity to make amends. Unfortunately, the film version, directed
by the grade-B Hollywood German-born director, Arthur Dreifuss, never quite
gave me the opportunity to experience Behan’s dark, gallows-humor work.
The first act, which in the play was
mostly outside of the prison, was quickly moved within so that prisoners could
release their tensions through song and complaint as the new “screw” (prison
overseer) arrives. Patrick McGoohan as the well-meaning rustic new prison guard
Crimmin is quite excellent in his innocent eagerness to learn and in expressing
his in-born sensitivity, despite his seeming ignorance of the brutal world in
which he has just entered.
Fortunately, he has Regan (Walker Macken)
as a seasoned guide to help him find his way. Although Crimmin believes firmly
in the criminal system, Regan, who has served in the prison for many years, has
a much more skeptical view of the entire system, particularly since there are
now two “quare fellows” (queer men, men outside of the normal prison
population) who are about to be executed, and Regan has seen far too man
executions in his service.
In the play, Behan uses this first act,
removed basically from the inner workings of prison life to help break down
Crimmin’s naivete through the dark humor that characterizes much of his
writing. By quickly jumping into the prison itself (realistic as it is: it was
filmed in the real County Wicklow prison), we lose the objectivity that Crimmin
must later come to, and the real horror of a system (much like that still in US
prisons today) which still consider it permissible to kill certain prisoners,
including one of the “quare fellows,” named as the silver-caned murderer, who,
it appears, is actually a “gay” Wildean kind of man (not made evident in this
film production), whose actual crime we never discover; one must recall,
however, being gay was still a punishable offence in these days. It hardly
seems to matter, since his punishment is stayed; yet, despite that fact he soon
after he hangs himself, the fact of which perhaps says more than even his
terrible punishment.
The other “quare fellow,” whose crime in
the original play was also very vaguely presented, in this production we
discover, has murdered his brother. And this is where the well-intentioned film
really begins to unravel, moving to a kind of social documentation against
capital punishment.
In its determined attempt to decry that terrible
reality, Dreifuss’s and Jacqueline Sundstrom’s script, widely swinging away
from Behan’s far subtler dramatization, introduces the other “quare fellow’s”
wife (Sylvia Syms), who resides in the same boarding house as Crimmin, and
gradually convinces him that her affair with her husband’s brother is behind
the fraternal murder committed by her husband, who refused to mention the
affair during proceedings in an attempt to protect her from being described as
a “whore” In short, what was a story of male intrigue and governmental
suspicion is turned in this director’s vision to a kind of melodrama about
heterosexual jealousy and revenge, giving the comic and far darker elements of
Behan’s play an almost melodramatic flair, in which she 
and Crimmin attempt to
save the day—without success. The drama of this film is entirely centered upon
the events concerning the possibilities of saving her murderous husband, which
we already know, given the dismissals and snobbery of the authorities will
never happen.
There are some excellent moments in this
film: particularly when two seasoned criminals drink down the rubbing alcohol that
Crimmins is trying to administer to their knees. And the interchanges between Syms
(as Kathleen) and Crimmins almost incriminates him in having a secret boarding-house
affair, which, of course, transforms the innocent rube from the West coast into
a kind of willing participant in witness tampering.
Generally, the acting, particularly by
McGoohan and Macken is credible, and some of the moodily expressionistic
cinematic images are quite arresting. But this is clearly not the Irish
masterpiece of dark prison humor and suffering that the playwright intended it
to be.
Although the movie received, in its day,
general acclaim, Dreifuss, after, went back to grade B Hollywood films such as Life Begins at 17 (1958) and Juke Box Rhythm (1959). Too bad that the
great Joan Littlewood, the original director (who died in 2002) wasn’t allowed
to transfer this film onto screen.
Los Angeles,
September 29, 2018
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