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...But what I want to know is...

...He could only have whispered that the script let no cliche about the Irish go idle...

...Franz Josef listened with tacit, fuming impa-, tience as his officer went on and on about X's faithfulness, devotion to the church, coolness under fire, contempt for the Prussians, etc., etc., until his majesty finally exploded, "Dammit, man, I know the fellow's a patriot...

...Brendan, who bellows at the girl who refuses to marry him, "It doesn't matter that you don't love me, I love you...

...Finney is English, of course, and two Americans play the lovers...

...By contrast, there's an earlier moment when the girl, with Brendan's unspoken permission, sets her lover free from the lock-up and whisks him past the policeman and outside...

...a line that will be finished by wiseacres in the audience before the dependent clause is out of Milo O'Shea's mouth...

...Robin Wright has an exceptionally believable accent and a winning manner as the unwed beauty...

...Aiden Quinn, though working very hard at elfish smiles and a believable brogue, is somehow less convincing here on the sod of his ancestors than when he played a patient Jewish father in Avalon...

...So the script has graceful dialogue...

...Or Albert Finney's Brendan Hegarty in The Playboys...

...Brendan, who fills to bursting his uniform with an ox-like frame and has developed a glare that could freeze Teamster pickets at a hundred yards, but is only really happy sitting at his woodworking bench and carving a cradle...

...This Irish movie has non-Irish actors in the three leads...

...Of all great actors, Finney has the least mobile of masks...

...Is he a patriot for me...

...With his massive arms hanging impotently at his sides, Finney blankly gazes after the lovers until they're out of sight, sags his body slightly to the left, and lets his frozen face go slack...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...Its very fixity transfixes you...

...But just mentally subtract Finney from this movie and sew in any merely competent actor that comes to mind and you will realize that without this powerhouse performance holding it up, The Playboys would stand about as firm as an empty cellophane bag caught in a gale coming off the Irish Sea in mid-January...

...For instance, when the first television ever seen in the village is installed in the pub, one anticipates the scenes of everyone crowding in to stare at the novelty, but the kicker comes when the villagers, having been hypnotized by slick Hollywood movies on the set all afternoon and having seen Gone With the Wind at the local movie house that same day, are still content to watch the Playboys do the Margaret Mitchel story in an egregious improvised production that can't even get the plot straight...

...That it contained a jeering gossip calling after the heroine in the street, "Who be the father of your babe...

...So the story has the most surefire plot construction since The Maltese Falconi So?...so what...

...But is there a great part for mel\" And, if the part is right, it doesn't matter if the script is, in all other respects, wrong...

...Another instance: trying to smuggle some pigs past a local patrolman into Northern Ireland, the heroine offers the offiCommonweal cial a cash bribe...

...That the priest who chides the girl in church longs for her (what else...

...Brendan, who has enough hate in him to frame his rival in love for an IRA bombing but wilts under his beloved's glare when she demands that the boy go free...

...And the performance is a masterpiece, a subtle masterpiece even, an example of achieving maximum force with minimal means...

...This cop may be a corrupt official but he's a local boy, too, who recognizes good stock when he sees it...

...For Finney wasn't reading for freshness of story or language...

...Bootless would be such counsel...

...And in The Playboys, that strange negative gift is worked to its absolute limit...

...Dammit, man, I know this is a great script...

...If actors were fussy about the overall worth of projects, we would be without some indelible performances in otherwise delible pictures: Robert Shaw's blue-eyed assassin in From Russia, With Love, Nick Nolte's Neal Cassady in Heart Beat, Jill Bennett's angina-ridden aunt in The Nanny, and Robert De Niro's delicately shaded Monroe Starr in the mummified adaptation of The Last Tycoon...

...The effect is of an oak teetering...

...on the sly...

...Playing a man who absolutely cannot express his tender side and who paralyzes the woman he loves with fear and distaste, Finney so strictly tightens the muscles in his face and so thoroughly damps down the light in his eyes that any expression that flits across his countenance seems like an obscene confession...

...That the florid actor-manager, when pestered by his leading man for wages, gestures towards his caravan and declaims, "When I retire, all this will be yours...

...So this film will lay bare the central concerns of our era...

...And as for sheer physical believability, try this: the heroine, at the back of the theater tent, peers through an opening in the canvas, and her future boyfriend, performing on stage sixty feet away with an electric spotlight shining in his eyes, spies her eyeball peeking at him from the outer nocCommonweal turnal darkness and identifies her immediately...

...The rest of the movie has a jolly, charming staleness that is mitigated by the filmmakers' knack for steering certain scenes just a bit aslant their cliched destinations...

...Finney, with visions of Emil Jannings, Charles Laughton, Victor McLaglen, and every other masochistic brute in cinema history dancing in his head, knew exactly what he wanted to do with Brendan and went right ahead and did it...

...Even if some artistic guardian angel had been at Finney's elbow as the actor read through the script by Gilles Mackinnon and Shane Connaughton about a young Irishwoman of the late 1950s disrupting her village—first by having an illegitimate baby whose father she won't marry or even reveal, and then by falling for a young actor of a traveling troupe—what good would it have done for the angel to warn Finney...

...That's the way actors consider scripts...

...And, the angel might whisper, after The Quiet Man, do we really need another Irish movie in which the antagonists duke it out in front of the entire village...

...I'm glad this is the case...

...Brendan the ex-boozer who keeps a full bottle of whiskey in the cupboard, stares at it from time to time, but won't drink it...

...He had his mind's eye fixed on one character: Brendan the village's policeman...

...That the romantic leads meet cute, Irish-fashion, when the boy tries to steal a chicken from the girl's coop...

...But notice the split-second grin that Finney flashes when he and his rival finally face off at the end and put up their fists: Ah, at last here is something I know how to do and enjoy...

...We can predict that he'll take it, but a nice touch is added: he also extracts one of the porkers from her truck...