History no obstacle for Hollywood - In the Name of the Father - Fair Comment

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 21, 1994 | by Richard Grenier

Among the most nominated movies for an Academy Award -- after Holocaust-inspired Schindler's List -- is In the Name of the Father, a film bristling with Irish politics and the Irish Republican Army. Were the nominations for In the Name of the Father perhaps influenced by the fact that its heroes, "the Guildford Four," include Paul Hill, a nephew by marriage of Sen. Ted Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, our ambassador to Dublin? Hill is to I ave heard on appeal in Belfast his conviction for abduction and murder of a former British soldier -- an event entirely separate from the Guildford incident. But the point is, In the Name of the Father doesn't appeal to an Irish-American constituency so much as a moral constituency.

In our time the sacred mission of journalists, academics and the arts is to struggle against injustice. The complacent assumption -- most silly when we get to Hollywood -- is that these people are able to determine, first, precisely what's unjust and, more important, precisely what to do about it. But the thirst for justice is so strong that these people will struggle against injustice even when there might be no injustice to start. I offer you the Guildford Four.

This is no minor legal squabble, but one of the longest and most bitterly contested chapters in the annals of British justice. In 1974, the IRA, all puffed up with new Libyan support, committed a series of pub bombings in England which left 40 innocent people dead, hundreds wounded and produced a national uproar. The first of these pub bombings occurred at Guildford. The Guildford Four, including the Kennedy nephew, were convicted in relation to this incident and received long prison sentences.

But the Guildford Four later won their freedom on what many believe to be a technicality -- mainly that the notes of their interrogation were not "contemporaneous" and that their guilty verdict was consequently "unsafe." Then the three detectives who had conducted the interrogation of the Guildford Four were put on trial, and they, too, were found not guilty. So, both sides were not guilty.

One of the Guildford Four, Gerry Conlon, wrote a book; director Jim Sheridan (of My Left Foot fame) used the book as the basis for In the Name of the Father, at which point we say farewell forever to the historical record.

Sheridan says he wanted to make a movie like the Hollywood historical films of the 1930s -- not accurate in detail, you understand, but true to the spirit of the events. On that score, one can only say that the man is as good as his word. Aside from the fact that Gerry Conlon (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) and the other Guildford Four are real people, it's difficult to locate a a single historical fact in the movie. The British press has called the film "a farrago of rubbish."

The wicked Inspector Dixon, who falsifies evidence against the Guildford Four, is fictitious. The wicked IRA operative Joe McAndrew also is fictitious. Conlon's solicitor Gareth Pierce (played by Emma Thompson) is 90 percent fictitious, and the rousing speech she delivers at the Old Bailey is a complete invention. (Solicitors do not plead at the bar in Britain. Such people are called "barristers.")

Conlon's alibi -- that he was robbing a prostitute's flat the night of the bombing -- is less than perfect. In real life, he didn't rob the prostitute's flat until 10 days later In the movie, Conlon and his father share the same prison cell, but in real life not only did they not share the same prison cell, they were rarely in prison.

But the key to the Guildford Four's movie appeal is that the prosecution withheld evidence from the defense. In fact, it did no such thing. The prosecution communicated all evidence to the defense exactly as it should have. Need I go on?

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story," say Hollywood cynics. But the people who made In the Name of the Father aren't cynics. Indeed, they present themselves as highly moral. But this much lying is unusual on the part of people who excoriate other people for lying.

In the world of Barbra Streisand, a righteous moral tone is all. Hollywood bravely condemns Hitler's death camps 50 years after the fact. And the feeling of righteous condemnation is so intoxicating that Hollywood is proceeding to condemn moral outrages that might never even have happened. Surely, greater love of righteousness hath no man.