Filmmaker Paul Duane celebrates his favourite Irish cult movie classics...
THE HARD WAY (Michael Dryhurst, Richard Ryan/Tombleson (uncredited), 1980
What is it? An atmospheric, hard-bitten thriller about a mercenary hitman, John Connor (played by the legendary actor/creator of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan), who wants to leave the business. However, there's a shadowy American, McNeal (played by Lee Van Cleef, who you might remember from such films as The Good, the Bad & the Ugly), pulling him back in, against the wishes of Connor’s estranged wife Eileen (played, astonishingly, by distinguished novelist Edna O’Brien). Shot by Henry Decaë, the cinematographer who helped make Jean-Pierre Melville’s hitman fantasy Le Samourai into a classic of French cinema, and scored intermittently (and a bit literally) with Brian Eno’s Music For Films.
Why is it important? Executive produced by John Boorman, the film is marked by the same kind of existential neo-noir influence that also turns up in a later film he produced, Neil Jordan’s Angel (1982), so it’s tempting to see it as a precursor. It’s also a fascinating document of 1970s Dublin, with scenes in Toner’s pub and on the Luggala estate in Wicklow. And where else will you see Lee Van Cleef on the escalator in Dublin Airport?
How did it get made? Made by Black Lion Films, whose other film of 1980 was The Long Good Friday, for Lord Lew Grade’s ITC, it seems to have been put together as a TV movie at a time when ITC was facing severe difficulties from their box-office bomb Raise The Titanic. The original director, Richard Tombleson (who wrote the script under the name Richard Ryan) left the shoot a week into production. You can read about my surprising encounter with him here – let’s just say that he and his mercurial, spiky leading man, McGoohan, did not see eye to eye. The assistant director, Michael Dryhurst, took over, and brought his experience from working with Mike Hodges on Get Carter to the table. It went out on ITV in February 1980 and pretty much disappeared completely, except for those of us who watched the late-night ITV re-runs and spread the word about this utterly anomalous Irish movie influenced by the great Melville, whose work found a new audience in the '90s as the likes of John Woo and Qurentin Tarantino sang his praises.
How did it go down? The only contemporary review I can find is from the Radio Times, an ungenerous 2/5, however the more recent user reviews on IMDB are more positive, with one reviewer having seen it at the age of seven and never forgotten it. One superfan has even visited all the locations!
What should have happened? If the original director had stayed on board to complete his vision of a Melville-esque, pared-down, emotionless arthouse ‘thriller’ shot by the great Decaë, who knows what it might have been like? Instead the film is plagued by some genuinely awful ‘additional cinematography’ clearly shot after the troubled main production, and with important story information missing because scenes were clearly dropped. These things do happen, unfortunately.
What happened instead? Neither of the directors ever directed again, and the film was consigned to late-night ITV and a hard-to-find DVD. It resurfaced at the 2010 Edinburgh Film Festival as part of a ‘lost movies’ strand & can be found streaming on Prime. It is very much worth seeking out.
Enjoy more Irish Cult Movie Classics here.
