The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 3
Part III: The Last Hurrah and the Limits of Fordian Americana
One of John Martin Feeney's most interesting later films is The Last Hurrah (1957) which deals with the electoral defeat of an old-time Irish-American boss politician Frank Skeffington played by Spencer Treacy. While it is considered something of a failure, it has important implications for Feeney's developing vision of the United States.
The film, while wonderfully acted and produced, is often criticised for lacking true political complexity. It lacks the competing viewpoints that complicate the climaxes of Fort Apache (1948) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
The climaxes of those two films contain opposing viewpoints and this renders their impact dialectical. We do not know at the end of Fort Apache who the filmmakers want us to sympathise with. Is it with the Apache Indians or with the US Cavalry bent on their destruction? Or somehow both? In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance how do we feel about James Stewart's idealist lawyer turned political careerist? Has he brought civilisation to the West or just corruption and hypocrisy?
It is the ability to see two sides at once which F. Scott Fitzgerald, another artist with Irish Catholic connections, observed to be the truest sign of intelligence. “Who better than an Irishman can understand the Indians, while still being stirred by tales of the US cavalry?” Feeney remarked about Fort Apache. But The Last Hurrah is, on the face of it, a strictly partisan work. It exonerates Frank Skeffington for any serious wrong doing and valourises him as a Great Man. It takes the side of the tough Irish-American boss politician against the waning Anglo-Protestant elites.
Despite its often jovial tone, The Last Hurrah is a pessimistic work. It may be the most pessimistic of all Feeney's films. In it we witness the bitter defeat of his multicultural Americana, or at least the structural inevitability of its defeat. There is a pivotal scene where Frank Skeffington invades the Plymouth Club, an Anglo-Protestant social club, to confront the commercial, banking and media elites who have joined forces against him. There follows a bitter exchange of racial animosity which no smudging on Feeney's part can fully cover over:
Frank Skeffington: There is nothing wrong with this city's credit and you know it.
Norman Cass, Sr: On that we happen to differ.
Frank Skeffington: On that and one or two other points. But it really all boils down to one, doesn't it? The fact that the city is no longer yours, it's ours. You have this musty shrine to your blue-nosed ancestors but my People have City Hall. And that's what sticks in your craw. You can't swallow it and you can't forget it. Well I'm going to make you eat it. That housing project is going up as planned, and it's going to open on schedule. And you know what day that's going to be? St. Patrick's Day!
One can view this scene as simply run of the mill liberal polemic or something significantly darker. Feeney's multicultural Americana crashes, as it must in the end, on the rocks of his Irish Catholic partisanship. He was brought up on jeers of “shanty Irish.” He carries the vendetta of centuries old ethnic conflict. Skeffington's message to his Anglo-Protestant adversaries is essentially, “We will replace you.”
The necessity to paint Skeffington as a heroic figure (in Hollywood terms) means that his social values are essentially liberal. But all of that obfuscates the fact that Skeffington is clearly reactionary in many ways (and a figure of the Old World) as indeed were many of the Democrat boss politicians, e.g. Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago. And even though the Anglo-Protestants are painted as racist bigots, they also represent a puritan “progressive” worldview that sees Irish Catholics as a backward looking atavistic and reactionary force.
The Sun Shines Bright (1953) has a similar dynamic where the curmudgeonly hero Judge Priest (a Confederate war veteran) triumphs over his more bigoted yet theoretically more “progressive” Yankee political opponents. It is worth noting that the anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings” of the nineteenth century were strongly aligned with the Whigs and with the slavery abolitionists. In other words the “progressive” side. Historian Kelly J. O' Grady writes, “The Northern cabal of Yankee Puritans, radical abolitionists allied with the world's leading abolitionist state, Great Britain, and nativist Whigs and Know-Nothings represented the historic enemies of the Irish people.” In Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2001) we only get hints at the true complexity of the dialectic by which Irish Catholics were both forces of innate Jacobite reaction and tactical Jacobin liberalism.
American Multiculturalism as Survival of the Fittest?
We are going to replace you and there is nothing you can do about it. That is what Skeffington has to say and however you wrap it up it isn't very pretty. It isn't sugar coated in what it implies. There is a scene in Feeney's silent western Three Bad Men (1926) where an anonymous Indian stares silently across the plains at an endless procession of settlers in covered wagons. He stares at them and they keep coming. It is a brief moment in the film (a quick succession of wide shot, medium shot and close-up) but what it conveys is powerful. The comprehension in a human face of vast historical tides. The futility of a man whose whole race is about to be swept aside by “material progress.” A whole other civilisation with its own cares and its own wants is about to park itself on top of his. When one speaks of a poetry of dispossession this is it.
The reality of Americana is simply wave after wave of cultural displacement. In The Last Hurrah the Irish for a moment have won. They have taken political control of these East Coast cities but in accepting the liberal priors of Pax Americana, they are fated themselves to be displaced by future waves. Neither run-away liberalism nor Cold War conservatism have any way of preventing this. They must support it. The Catholic communities such as we see in the film will, very shorty afterwards, be broken up and transformed. Such is the American project.
Feeney's Cavalry trilogy of 1948-1950 depicts Irish immigrant soldiers at the spearhead of Manifest Destiny. They are tasked with the dirty work of putting down the horse warrior tribes of the Great Plains. Feeney features a sympathetic portrayal of General Philip Sheridan, played by the Irish born J. Carrol Naish, even as he lingers on the bitter legacy of the Shenandoah Valley campaign in which Sheridan's Union cavalry burnt and pillaged during the Civil War. After the South was defeated, Sheridan lead troops in the Indian Wars, where he employed just as uncompromising methods. To Sheridan was later credited the statement, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” And though he denied having made it, it followed him to his grave. The fact that Sheridan, the son of Catholic parents from Killinkere in County Cavan, played a major role in the Yankee victories over the Southern Confederates and the Plains Indians, ought to remove any romantic notions we have of emigration or immigration. The movements of peoples are always at a cost. The history of the United States is one of perpetual dispossession.
In The Last Hurrah Feeney has some revenge on the New England Protestants who looked down on him as a child. He had already depicted the antagonisms between Irish Catholics and Anglo Protestants in Fort Apache (1948) but here it becomes the central conflict. There are no Indians to unite against. It is a political fight to the death between the Old Anglo elites and the Catholic upstarts. But neither side in the story really win.
“Victorious in Defeat” or “Defeat in Victory”?
Skeffington is booted out of office only when the Protestant elites astroturf an alternative Irish Catholic candidate and boost his profile with a modern mass-media campaign. But there is no joy in victory. The WASPs are on their way out and they know it. Just as surely as the old boss politics of Skeffington (the Catholic ethno-religious politics) are on their way out. We see that the new television generation is already being subsumed into suburban sameness in bland post-war America. Media power has won. The money power has won.
Feeney's celebration of the corrupt but vital boss politician failing to stem the tide of the modern world is in one sense shamelessly reactionary. Steffington, “victorious in defeat”, dies the death of some kind of Gaelic Chief, visited in his bed by an endless retinue of friends, clients and cronies. A phase of Irish ethnic power in America is being waked.
A few years after this film was made, John F. Kennedy became President of the United States in what was the supposed high tide of Catholic power. Feeney claimed it was the first moment he felt himself really an American. But Irish America was already being targeted for destruction. The old ethnic neighborhoods, the power bases of men like Skeffington, were giving way to demographic change and racial conflict. John F. Kennedy, the symbol of Irish Catholic ethnic power, would be publicly executed. The quasi-conquest of America by the Irish would be stymied.
The double defeat of Protestant and Catholic power is the unspoken prophecy of The Last Hurrah. Feeney himself was married to an Irish Protestant so he was perhaps more sensitive to it than he otherwise might have been. Both Skeffington and his Anglo-Protestant rival have wayward sons. The theme of weak sons is Feeney's bitter commentary on 1950s America. This was the America which he himself had gone to war for. The future generation is shown to be vapid and without roots. They listen to jazz music and fritter their lives away. They lack the values and wisdom of their fathers. They are loud, stupid and comically childish. Consumerism, frivolity and hedonism are their gods. Both the Anglo-Protestant nativists and the Irish Catholic upstarts face the same trend toward atrophy. Their energies and genius, wasted away by the treacherous values of post-war America. This is the film's prophecy.
In Feeney's strange multicultural dream of the United States, full assimilation is paradoxically death. What does becoming a “real American” actually mean? Is it a net gain or a net loss? The question is rarely addressed in American cinema. It is notably more prominent in the works of two other Catholic filmmakers (Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola) at least in their 1970s output. It is particularly so in the first two Godfather films both of which depict the process of assimilation into American life as one of increasing dislocation from ritual and tradition.
The Assimilated and Damned
After Skeffington's outburst at the Plymouth Club, a Protestant Bishop present attempts to intercede. He gives us what most people might agree is the liberal narrative.
Bishop Gardner: Aren't you being a bit too Irish? Certainly what you said may have been true once. The jealousy, the resentment we old-time Yankees had for your People when you first began crowding in. I'd say it was natural enough. But look at what's been happening. Our boys and girls are going to the same schools and colleges. They're intermarrying, raising families.
Amos Force: No child of mine will ever marry one of them.
Bishop Gardner: That's not surprising Amos given that you're a bachelor.
The film gives us gestures towards liberal social beliefs that are strangely muddied by Feeney's pessimistic attitude about modern progress. Bishop Gardner puts forward a view that, with time, the two ethno-religious communities will mix and become one. Become real Americans, you might say. But is this an improvement? The new America is shown by Feeney's social commentary to be vapid and deracinated. By contrast the Old World is mourned with respect. The film lingers on the rituals of a tight knit ethnic community and leaves us with a sense that nothing good is going to take its place. With the dissolution of the old communal structures comes the dissolution of the family and of any rooted sense of belonging. There can be little doubt that Feeney sees a world that is in decline.
Conclusion
These three articles have been an attempt to make Feeney's work a little more relevant to an Irish audience who, for the most part, never see beyond The Quiet Man. Filmmakers as distinguished as Ingmar Begman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Jean Renoir all viewed Feeney as one of the major artists of the twentieth century. And there is no reason why Irish people should not be more aware of his stature. Secondly, it has been attempted here to make Feeney more relevant to Irish nationalists and particularly nationalists coming of age at this particular juncture.
Irish society in its immediate hangover from several decades of unquestioned American liberalism, faces new dilemmas. Young people growing up today face perplexing conditions for moral and spiritual growth which are often difficult to communicate to their parents' generation. The subjects of moral decline, cultural decadence and American-style multiculturalism are themes no longer abstract but real lived experience.
Feeney is not a straightforward or altogether coherent figure. Like most great artists he is a flawed and troubled human being. His aesthetic instincts are more interesting than his exact politics or philosophy. His concerns about the dissolution of the family structure in a liberal capitalistic society, his reverence for military ritual as a bulwark of tradition, his frank depictions of masculinity and femininity, his visual poetry, his gift for improvised comedy, his bullheaded Irish peasant identity which he imposed not only onto his films but onto the world around him, his sincere Irish nationalism, all of these things are vital and worthwhile aspects of his filmography.
His relationship to progressive American social ideas is contradictory and unresolved within the body of his work. He perpetuates many of the liberal social values that basically all “liberal” and “conservative” artists pursued in that period. In particular his films portray a kind of inclusive Americana in which the Irish play a significant role. But his pessimism about the post-war world and his obsessions with order, ritual, community and tradition, make even his liberal preoccupations look reactionary today. His films highlight both the healthy noble aspects of American civilisation and the contradictions which continually threaten to tear that civilisation apart.
Feeney's version of multiculturalism does not in the end work out, except as a way of maintaining (or even mourning) rooted Old World structures in a context of massive social upheaval. His Americana is paradoxically a retreat from the real consequences of American hegemony. The Irish nationalist John Mitchel advised the Irish in America to assimilate or face an unhappy fate. Feeney is characteristic perhaps of that unhappy fate. And in reality, his films are not optimistic social commentaries but retreats into formalised ritual and rooted ethnic identity. That too should be a lesson.
Peoples and cultures expand at the expense of other peoples and cultures. What is sold as unqualified progress is more often than not a vast machinery of dissolution and dispossession. Rallying around the American flag does not a Utopia make. Rallying around the American empire likewise. In a sense we, the Irish of 2024, find ourselves beset by many of the same conundrums. As our society becomes more a province of American culture, we too absorb its instabilities and contradictions. We too find ourselves dislocated subjects of a global empire. But we who are not yet fully amputated from our Mother Country must find different answers.