Hear My Song

National Review, March 30, 1992 by John Simon

PETER CHELSOM'S Hear My Song is an attempt to capture the fey charm of Ireland at its most leprechaunish by recapturing the charm of the old Ealing Studios comedies at their most English. You recall those delightful comedies of several decades ago when Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Grenfell, James Robertson Justice, and other such foxy folk made us laugh intelligent laughter of the sort that never made us miss a joke because we were still rolling in the aisles over the last one. After all, we were not being paid to dust the floor with our clothing; the Ealing (I almost wrote "healing") films made us laugh with our minds and hearts rather than with our bellies.

Well, Hear My Song is about Micky O'Neill, a desperate pop-concert promoter, whose Liverpool nightclub, Heartly's, is slipping. Unable to book a decent act into it, he has to resort to fellows like Franc Cinatra, who reads fine to people who have no eye for spelling, but sounds dreadful to those with an ear for music. Under the threat of foreclosure, Micky books a chap who bills himself as "Mr. X-is it or isn't it?" The reference is to Josef (Jo) Locke, the legendary Irish tenor whose voice made women weep, but whose evasions did not make the tax collector smile.

So, thirty years ago, just after being a judge in the Miss Dairy Goodness beauty contest and crowning pretty Cathleen Doyle as winner, only to start a hot affair with her-and no less hotly pursued by Constable Jim Abbott-Josef had to flee to Ireland. Though Jim also had the hots for Cathleen, her daughter, Nancy, was presumably (even if the film dare not spell it out) Jo's love child. The pretty and spunky dental hygienist is now Micky's girlfriend, but not above interrupting him in mid-coitus when he can't bring himself to utter the words "I love you," and running out on him. He is left flat, and flat broke.

Mr. X is having his troubles, too. A Jo Locke look-alike and sound-alike, he can fool some of the audience and even Cathleen into wishfully thinking he is Locke. But he does not fool the constable, the rest of the audience, or even the still loving Cathleen once he has sweet-sung and sweet-talked her into bed, where he proves more like Brand X. With Mr. X exposed, Micky has no choice but to find the real Josef Locke and bring him back alive and aloud, constables or no constables. The wrecking ball hangs over Heartly's and Nancy's heart is cooling. So off to Ireland goes Micky.

He enlists the reluctant help of his friend Fintan O'Donnell, a small-time Dublin talent agent and owner of a hoary Morris Traveller in which the two of them trundle off to picturesque Tullamore, where Jo was last sighted. Eccentricities in an Irish pub, picture-postcard-pretty scenery, a prize cow Locke is bidding on at auction accidentally won by Micky, an old well into which someone (Micky, Fintan, or the cow) may fall, Micky mistaken by Jo and his cronies for a fiendish tax collector ... on and on goes the likable but labored comedy, chugging along unoiled by Ealing knowhow.

Co-written by England's Peter Chelsom and Ulster's Adrian Dunbar, with Chelsom directing and Dunbar starring as Micky, Hear My Song comes across loud and muddy. Partly based on fact (Jo Locke, Mr. X, and the constabulary) and partly invented (Micky, Nancy, Cathleen), it has some of the ingredients of luscious humor, but not the characters and characterizations that bejeweled British comedy in its prime. Micky, the brinkmanship gymnast and tightrope talker, needs the charm of a Robert Donat or a Roger Livesey and the writing of a T. E. B. Clarke. Tara Fitzgerald is a breathtaking young Nancy, and Shirley Anne Field a stunning middle-aged Cathleen; all either of them needs is better material.

Can you imagine Ealing having to import actors from America? Both the real and the fake Josef Locke are transoceanic. Ned Beatty is expectably good at the darker aspects of Jo, and surprisingly twinkly at the lighter ones, but he cannot convey a charismatic singer, no matter how plummy a voice is pumped into him, because the tenors who make women weep do it with something more than singing (though not necessarily looks), And that is not forthcoming. As Mr. X, William Hootkins is a little too creepy to be funny. David McCallum is a proper nemesis of a constable, and, in his very first film, James Nesbitt is a Fintan that outshines Adrian Dunbar's Micky; but the rest of the supporting cast is humdrum. There is an idiomatic pub scene and a flash of bravura in the otherwise harum-scarum climax, but Hear My Song does not satisfy as the succulent old comedies did. Or were we just younger then?

* On the contrary, Fried Green Tomatoes, from which the very title might scare off faint hearts and city slickers (especially those who are not Southerners), proves to be an unassumingly graceful and, aside from a few heavy touches, fulfilling film. Based on a novel by Fannie Flagg, a former actress and stand-up comedienne, and co-scripted by her and the late Carol Sobieski, this is a woman's picture" that nevertheless should go down pleasurably with male viewers, demonstrating that not even feminism, of which there is plenty in the movie, can drive an undislodgeable wedge between men and women.