The Informer is a movie all about the IRA that never once mentions the IRA. Made in 1935, the second adaptation of a novel by Liam O’Flaherty, it is a movie that probably should not have been attempted in the circumstances it was. Even with thirteen years passing since publication, it was a story deeply topical and deeply political -concerning the strife in Ireland that most Americans were wilfully ignorant of. In fact most of them still are -though highly relevant as a touchstone, especially given current affairs of much greater public interest, the “Troubles” means nothing to the average person on this side of the Atlantic. And a movie like The Informer only serves to make that subject matter more vague.
However, it was regarded very highly at the time of its release. It was widely praised, decently influential, and even for a few decades appeared on several lists of Best Movies Ever Made. Like a previous entry in this series though, Cavalcade from a few years earlier, it’s reputation has sunk considerably -not necessarily as a bad movie but as an unmemorable one. More than anything, The Informer is an Oscars trivia entry -winner of both the award for Best Actor for Victor McLaglen (smudged between Clark Gable and Paul Muni -much better remembered stars of their time), and more notably for being the first of a record four Oscar wins for its director John Ford.
The Informer might even be regarded as the movie that really broke Ford through, certainly in terms of its critical and awards acclaim. Though he’d been working steadily since the silent era, all of Ford’s best-known movies came after, from Stagecoach to his next back-to-back wins for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, to his western genre dominance that would come to define his career, perhaps most starkly in My Darling Clementine and The Searchers. Ford though always had an underwritten affection for his Irish heritage (his birth name was Feeney) something explored apparently far more successfully in his last Oscar win, The Quiet Man. So it’s very curious to see this impression he casts of that homeland and its people at a very critical moment in their road to self-actualization. Or at least what can be made of his impression through the dense studio and producer interference that was the way of the industry in these earliest years of the Production Code.
It is the story of Gypo Nolan, played by McLaglen, a drunk and incompetent kicked out of the Republican Army for failing to kill a Black and Tan constable. With little money and nowhere to go, and his sex worker lover Katie (Margot Grahame) wanting to leave for America, he turns informer on one of his friends Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford) -who is subsequently killed by the British in his home. Both haunted by the guilt and unable to control his vices, Gypo soon invites the scrutiny of his former IRA colleagues looking to avenge Frankie’s death.
Due to its innuendos, the movie has great difficulty conveying its context beyond the most vague notions of a conflict in Ireland between Irish rebels and British authorities. The IRA is cast as a loose collective of locals far more than anything concretely organized while the Black and Tans are mere police. There is a very working-class urban feel to the whole thing -it’s all set on about the same few city blocks in Dublin; and the IRA itself -”the Organization” as it is simply referred to here- are characterized with a particular penchant for violence. Their fundamental lack of ‘organization’ paints them as a gang, not unlike those in mob pictures in the U.S. at the time. Despite this, the movie doesn’t come out on principle for one side or the other, in a move that seems finely calculated. Certainly the Irish are the underdogs, and Ford especially couldn’t have been blind to parallels between theirs and the Americans’ fight for independence against the British. However it was a very recent conflict at the time the movie was made -one that the British were still sour on and the tensions in Ireland as a result still pronounced. Britain being a major geopolitical ally to the U.S. probably kept them from being too tarnished by this movie as the villains.
Rather than either side, it is the act of informing that is subject to the most critique here. The consequences and the guilt of Gypo’s actions drives the bulk of the story. He attempts to escape it through his usual vices, but it only makes his problems worse as it signals more strongly his crime (or at least some crime) to the organization at large. Gypo is not a careful character, it could be argued he’s especially careless in fact and rather a moron -making no effort to hide his influx of cash or good spirits (as surely as they come they vanish in his guilt). But this portion of the story doesn’t really interest me, rather what comes of the sleuthing by his IRA compatriots and where it lands him when they do find out. A lot of this movie feels familiar if you know a certain far better movie made four years earlier a continent away. And indeed when it comes to Gypo being tried by a kangaroo court the allusion to Fritz Lang’s M is impossible to deny. Ford may well have seen M and like many been compelled by its dramatic depiction of mob justice and unsettling emotions it evokes even when targeting a man guilty of loathsome crimes. But Gypo’s transgression is not nearly so severe, while the actions of his persecutors is cast in far less an ambiguous light. M was morally challenging while The Informer ascribes to fairly clear-cut Hollywood values. Values it can get away with by refusing to deal in specificities of either side. You’re meant to understand that what Gypo did was wrong –though only because it got someone killed- and root for his redemption as his only means of salvation.
This is made almost laughably transparent by the ending, which allows Gypo both to pay for his crime but with a last minute redemption of his soul by the mother of his victim (I always like seeing Una O’Connor in these 1930s movies), and in a church no less. It feels disingenuous, especially the forgiveness, which comes out of nowhere without Gypo doing anything other than dying to earn it. And it is yet another show of the story limitations in Hollywood under the Code. I don’t know if it was the same in the original novel, or the earlier silent film adaptation from 1929 (a British film, so likely even more biased), but in this movie the outcome of all that conflict and guilt is a profound anticlimax.
It was considered moving for some, likely off the back of McLaglen’s performance, which leans hard into tortured melodrama. For someone who came to acting through a boxing career, McLaglen does seem to have a solid angle on that, he gives the impression of someone capable of great performance (I haven’t seen any of his other movies); but he is hamstrung by the accent, which might be the source of every bad Irish accent in American media for the next five decades or so. And it doesn’t help that it is attached to about the most stereotypical image of an Irishman put on screen: a clueless though giddy drunk with an implicit anger problem.
Few of his co-stars were Irish either, and none of the main players that included American Preston Foster and British Heather Angel; none of them make much of an impression either, Ford knew he was directing to McLaglen, a favourite actor of his, who had already made several movies with him and would go on to several more (including in the aforementioned The Quiet Man, where he would receive a Best Supporting Actor nomination for yet another Irish performance). Given how lead actor-heavy the movie is, there isn’t a lot to be said for its qualities elsewhere -or what Ford manages to bring. I’ve reviewed a couple of his movies here before, and it’s clear his strengths are in the big. While few of his movies can be called epics, his best remembered tend to showcase the same scale of natural or narrative grandeur. The Informer though lacks a lot of that -confined entirely to sound-stages and without any real opportunities for Ford to let loose. Of course being leashed by studio probably factors into some of that. But nonetheless, it is one of the duller looking Ford movies, while also lacking a tenacity of ideas. Because of the Oscar win, The Informer is sometimes thought of as Ford’s break-out (though he had been making movies since 1917), yet I think it’s those movies he made at the turn of the next decade -Stagecoach and his next pair of Oscar winners- that really cemented his reputation and style, encapsulating the John Ford movie better than The Informer ever could.
But it’s the popularity of The Informer that won it those accolades at the time -same as how Mutiny on the Bounty won Best Picture that year. Neither are memorable movies. What value I can see in The Informer is purely historical -a relic of how Ireland and the Irish crises of the twentieth century were taken by Hollywood, how they were repackaged and sold to Americans. Ford perhaps tries to sneak a little bit of pro-Irish sentiment in there, the same as he would for socialist ideology in The Grapes of Wrath. But it’s far less successful. As stated The Informer is a trivia fact -which isn’t nothing. It gets to be mentioned in that long list of Best Director, Best Actor winning movies. And I perhaps thought it was worth seeking out just because of that. Altogether, it is not.
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