Aaaand here comes Christopher Shannon to rehabilitate the Irish. If this book were a boxty, it would arrive undercooked and leave you hungry. Its goals as "a study of film narrative" attempt to throw light on the "least represented ethnic group in American film" (Catholic Irish). Can this be true? The world did not know the contributions of Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracey et al? Or is this just blarney? Shannon begins by bemoaning how the Jewish contribution to film has been well-studied but by contrast "appreciation for those [Irish] stories has suffered from a single-minded scholarly obsession with the Irish Catholic role in film censorship." Gee, with heavy hitters like nasty old Father Coughlin and Joe Breen I wonder why!
Expostulating on film narrative without the nitty gritty of historical research serves a limited purpose: it leaves the reader with little beyond the stereotypes described. Shannon does not clearly identify what he means by the Irish (he casts a wide net and includes not only New York Irish Catholics, but people of Irish extraction born in Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia, surely a different life experience). As a non-Catholic, I would not know what the Catholic experience, habits or dogma entails and how the Catholic Irish experience would differ from say that of French or Filipino Catholics. What we do get (as when Shannon explains "grace") is not bad, but certainly doesn't provide me with a good grasp of the major unifying force for this community. And without details on demographics, or evidence from Irish American primary sources, I do not get a sense that somewhere out there in American theatres there was a living breathing, evolving Irish American community looking for themselves on screen. Tantalizing tidbits are casually tossed (as in the throwaway line about how some films were marketed specifically to Irish Americans - wait, what? More!) or are hidden in footnotes. After reading
Bowery to Broadway, I could facetiously summarize its thesis as "we were white, we assimilated pretty quickly, the end." Brevity - and this includes the paltry number of photographs used - is this book's undoing.
Excluding B-movies from his scope was a mistake, as it is in B's not A's where you are allowed to call a Mick a Mick and laugh about it. But Shannon is too busy trying to clean up the Irish. Claims like "Edward G Robinson and Paul Muni, who played the gangster heroes in
Little Caesar and
Scarface, easily shed their gangster image for other roles...[compared with James Cagney in
The Public Enemy]" are purely laughable. Paul Muni, yes - but c'mon, man, it's 80 years after
Little Caesar and are you telling me Robinson is known for something else aside from a gangster? Maybe as Dr Ehrlich, the physician searching for a cure for syphilis? Shannon also misses an opportunity to directly face the issue of the curious relationship between the Jews and Irish in the film industry, and his book's opening words contrasting the two communities, as well as strange claims like the one made about Robinson and Muni only exacerbate the problem. He cites numerous examples of instances where these former tenement neighbours found themselves together on film sets and scripts. Cagney spoke a little Yiddish. Bowery Cinderellas often found themselves with Jewish husbands - yet Shannon does not get too deep into why in
Kitty Foyle the character of Mark is cleansed of his Jewish identity while Kitty's Irishness remains.
