So it seems Docman is a Tan....
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The wind that shakes the Barley...
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Having just seen the movie myself, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, while still fresh in my mind.
Historically accurate.
To a fault. The emotion of the time carries well into the cinema and I feel the audience will in turn hate the British for their actions, the Free staters for their actions, the Clergy for their stance.
But this film tells it the way it was.
Currently I am researching my own family history and I could draw a lot of parallels to what my grandparents went through in the period depicted in the film.
My grandfathers first cousin was Liam Lynch, who led the anti Treaty side up to his death shortly after that of Collins. By coincidence i understand he was responsible for the banishment of a granduncle of mine out of the country for acts detrimental to law and order in the republic of the early 1920s.
It was always told to us as a time when brother fought against brother. Not just in the civil war years, but also during the Anglo Irish war. Many irish patriots who followed redmond joined the British army, and were distrusted by their own when they returned home following the war of 1914-1918. The alienation suffered by veterans of the Vietnam is nothing to the actual alienation these men suffered. Many more were members of the RIC. Career choices at the time depended on your family circumstances. If you were lucky, the oldest son got the farm, the next son became a priest, another a doctor. The RIC was another respected profession that young men took up, only for them to be labelled as traitors in 1919. Most left en masse following intimidation. Many of those who remained made up the beginnings of an Garda Siochana.
But back to the film. the only flaw i find in it is that it fails to close the story by telling that there was a happy ending. Ireland did become a republic. The Oath of allegience was abolished. The civil war ended, and those who were left got on with the business of building the great nation in which we live today. We did not get the six counties, but would we ever have got them had the treaty been rejected?
It also fails to explain to the more impressionable audience that the Auxiliaries and the Black and tans were not real British soldiers. They were the dregs of the British military who were brought in to deal with a situation the RIC were unwilling to deal with. Most were criminals, before or after the war. Most suffered some form of PTSS which would have been labelled "shell shock" at the time and would in todays society have been labelled "mentally unstable".
But the story is well told. The actors look and sound like natives of West Cork.
Go to it with an open mind.
Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.
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