FILM REVIEW: JIMMY'S HALL

A scene from Jimmy's Hall. Directed by Ken Loach.

Irish for more

By Ed Rampell

For those of you who are socialist cineastes and lefty film fans, who love movies in the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Herbert Biberman/Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth, I am the bearer of glad tidings: What is arguably the greatest contemporary leftist writer/director team in the English-speaking world now making pro-worker films are back! Just in time to help us celebrate the American Revolution, director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty's Jimmy's Hall opens tomorrow.

Thrill to expertly directed, stirring scenes of the class struggle! To speeches by downtrodden working class heroes standing up for social justice and human rights! Watch the mass hero, the collective proletarian protagonist, fight the iron heel of the state! What better way to celebrate America’s Revolutionary War -- certainly more fun than eating hotdogs and watching fireworks!

Based on a true story, Jimmy's Hall is about Jimmy Gralton (the handsome, charismatic Barry Ward), the only Irishman deported as an illegal alien from Ireland, the land of his birth -- without so much as a trial! Of course, Gralton's true crime was to fight against the reactionary church, aristocratic landowners and narrow nationalism by setting up a hall where ordinary people could dance to jazz music, study art and pursue a more class-conscious politics during the Depression.

It’s the class struggle dimension of their outlook that pits Jimmy's Hall workers against the narrow nationalism of the not-so-free Free Irish State of the 1930s. Here, the Loach/Laverty team return to historical terrain they already trod in the 2006 Irish Revolution epic, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, with Ireland’s leftwing struggling with the less radicalized nationalists.

Jimmy’s Hall also contains great acting, which enlivens the mass action mise-en-scene and sensibility. As Oonagh, Simone Kirby -- who has acted at the Abbey Theatre and Old Vic -- possesses a smoldering sexuality, whose love and desire for Jimmy has been thwarted by deportation. Even more heartfelt is Aileen Henry, who plays Jimmy’s mother. She calls to mind Vera Baranovskaya, who starred in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Soviet classic, Mother, based upon Maxim Gorky’s revolutionary novel. Even more so, this Irish earth mother is reminiscent of Jane Darwell, who movingly depicted Ma Joad in another immortal masterpiece of the silver screen, John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s pro-union novel, The Grapes of Wrath.  

This is great socialist cinema in the Eisensteinian tradition of revolutionary filmmaking, a heritage that the Loach/Laverty team gloriously, lovingly perpetuate.


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