Review of the Ireland into Film series: Each writer has also done an impressive amount of new archive research, which greatly enhances the series' value as fim history and film research. The volumes give full production details and where possible, contain good background interviews with writers and directors .Each volume is lavishly illustrated so that as well as providing good detailed information on the films and an engaged debate about adaptation in general, the series is also an excellent value for the collector. Handsome in design and including sensible stills, each of the three volumes provides a lengthy and insightful essay, full credits, and notes. This series is a splendid model for other national film institutes. All film collections. This title has been reviewed jointly with This Other Eden, by Fidelma Farley, and December Bride. These three concise monographs initiate a collaboration between Cork University and the Irish Film Institute and a series titled Ireland into Film. In his brilliant study of John Huston's last film (1987), an adaptation of James Joyce's last short story, The Dead (1907), Barry analyzes the film's tripartite structure of repetition and variation, the serenity that derives from its mix of apprehension and irresolution, and both its fidelity to and its strong misreading of the Joyce source. Barry attributes four major changes to the unforeseen Irish national narrative of independence, the development of the Hollywood classic style, Huston's own auteurship, and the advent of Joyce criticism
that is, Huston's changes sensitively adjust to the intervening history and the shift in medium. Though the other two volumes focus on less-known
and lesser
films, they approach the standard Barry sets. Analyzing the politics of Ulster Protestantism in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's 1990 film of Sam Hanna Bell's novel December Bride (1951), Pettitt considers Bell's own stage and radio adaptations and David Rudkin's screenplay, the plot's source, and the film's afterlife on television and home video. Pettitt's primary focus is the historical context of both the novel and its processes of adaptation. Farley examines how Muriel Box's 1959 film provides a comedic treatment of the legacy of the Civil War and Michael Collins's death and how the film anticipates the Irish cinema's major themes of 20 years later
oppression, emigration, the power of the church, nationalist martyrdom, illegitimacy, anti-English hostility, and national identity
noting that the film mocks the Irish while depicting British romanticizing of the Irish.
Lance Pettitt