Boorman's General

When John Boorman stood up at the Cannes Film Festival in May, to accept his Best Director prize for The General, a fact-based gangster film that opens in Los Angeles on Wednesday, not everybody was applauding. Some citizens of the British filmmaker's adopted homeland of Ireland were downright irate. Like The Godfather, like almost every other powerful crime film you can think of, this one has been slammed for romanticizing a violent thug.

The movie's title character, Martin Cahill, was Dublin's most notorious criminal mastermind of the 1980s. A brilliant tactician and a meticulous planner (hence his military nickname) who pulled off some of the richest and most elaborate jewel robberies and art thefts the city had ever seen. But Cahill (the Irish say "Cah-hill," not "Cay-hill") was also a brutal gang boss from one of the city's toughest neighborhoods, infamous for inflicting brutal punishments upon anyone who crossed him.

He was also a bit of a folk hero in Dublin, an anarchic free spirit who enjoyed tweaking authority figures of all sorts, from the Garda’ (the Irish national police force) to the self-righteous vigilantes of the Irish Republican Army. Cahill's exploits were exhaustively chronicled in Dublin tabloids like the Sunday World, whose chief crime reporter, Paul Williams, working undercover, broke the story of the Cahill mob in 1987. He also wrote the 1995 bestseller that served as the basis of Boorman's script. (Williams' book, The General: Godfather of Crime , is distributed in the US by the Irish American Book Company; it is available on-line from Amazon.com.).

"He became an emblem for Irish society," Wlliams says, speaking by phone from his home in Dublin. "He was the man you loved to hate, something you could point to and say, 'There is the evil.' Partly because he always wore a balaclava, and nobody ever saw his face until after he died, he captured the imagination of the public. He was our equivalent of Al Capone, an Irish criminal for the Irish people."

There was some talk within The General's organization of "taking out" the journalist who broke their cover, shooting him in the legs or burning down his house. "But he didn't do it," Williams says, "and I have to respect for that, at least. He said, 'Why punish his wife and kids for the job he does?' In the end they slashed the tires of all the cars in the Sunday World parking lot."

An IRA hitman put paid to Cahill's tumultuous career in August, 1994. The General was sitting behind the wheel of his Renault, pulled up at a Stop sign near his home, when he was shot four times with a .357 Magnum revolver.

The movie doesn't gloss over Cahill's criminal depredations. The effort at balance is built into the casting. Jon Voight, re-teamed with Boorman for the first time since Deliverance in 1972, and sporting a note-perfect Irish accent, is a strong presence as Ned Kenny, a composite character based on several cops who pursued the gangster. The detective's blunt observations consistantly undercut the gangster's salt-of-the-earth pretensions---pointing out, for example, that an ingenious jewel robbery, reenacted on film as a crowd-pleasing action set-piece, eventually threw 100 ordinary Dubliners out of work.

Boorman admits, however, that every movie tends to glamorize its subject. He says: "My mentor at the BBC in the 1960s, a man named Hugh Kenner, had a favorite saying: 'The act of making a film is always a celebration,' however critical you may try to be. It's kind of like Bertolt Brecht and his play Mother Courage. The nastier he made that character, the more people enjoyed it."

In his introduction to the Faber & Faber paperback edition of The General"'s screenplay, Boorman carries the "celebration" theme a step further:

"We finished the schedule with a week of nights. Our last night was in the Wicklow mountains above Luggala. In Excalibur, I had Merlin striding across this very hill. It was magically still. The sky was clear and the stars bent low over our little endeavor. We spoke with the muted voices of interlopers in a cathedral. On such nights the spirits make their presence felt. We should not have been surprised had some Celtic chieftain with the face of Martin Cahill appeared in our midst."

The legendary references didn't sit well with some of Cahill's victims. "The mythic Celtic stuff is nonsense," former Dublin forensic scientist James Donovan complained to TIME magazine. "The filmmakers are is some Celtic twilight mist of their own."

Donovan's run-in with The General is frankly depicted in the film. In 1982, just a day before he was scheduled to testify against Cahill in a robbery case, this officer of the court was severely injured by a car bomb. He lost the use of one leg, and his vision was permanently impaired by slivers of flying metal.

"People say there are humorous bits in the film," Donovan concluded, "but my experience of [Cahill's] humor was his laughter as he came down the steps of the court. And the next day the bomb went off in my car."

Boorman says he can certainly understand why Donovan "didn't appreciate Cahill's sense of humor." And Donovan was not alone. "Before the fact," Boorman says, "the film was incredibly controversial. People were poaching copies of the script and analyzing it. But the controversy mostly went away after the picture opened, because it is fair to all parties. I do show James Donovan being blown up, and I show him heroically limping back into court on crutches to give his evidence."

As for the "Celtic chieftain" references: "I was saying that this kind of character, this archetype, crops up all through Irish history. The Celtic chiefs had the same cunning and brutality mixed with a sense of celebration and fun. [Irish separatist leader] Michael Collins was the same character; he had the same discipline and ability to plan, the same brutality, and the same wit."

The sense of "romance" in The General is a matter of style as much than content. The writer-director of Hope and Glory has always enjoyed tackling difficult material---often just plain physically difficult, involving arduous months of shooting in the rain forests of Asia (Beyond Rangoon) or South America (The Emerald Forest). The new film, however, photographed in silky widescreen black & white, with languorous gliding camera moves, is a notably unstrenuous crime movie.

"So many of my films have been made at the absolute extremities of my powers" Boorman agreed, during a promotional stopover in Los Angeles. "I used to feel that if I wasn't pushing myself to the very limits I wasn't doing justice to the material. But The General was made well within my limits. It was unstrained. The experience made me think of something David Lean said a few weeks before he died: 'I'm just beginning to get the hang of this.'"

The seductiveness of the filmmaking in The General can be a little unsettling, however, considering its often horrific subject matter. Cahill was a disciplined professional criminal, not a mad dog, but violence was one of the staples tools of his trade. "From what I could gather," says actor Brendan Gleeson, who plays The General, "he wasn't somebody who enjoyed indulging in violence. He was very good at it, though, very good at making people afraid."

That's putting it mildly.

Cahill at one point began to suspect that one of his henchmen had pinched some loot for himself from a shipment he was supposed to deliver to a fence. In his book, journalist Paul Williams describes the horrendous "interrogation" that followed: Cahill first stapled the man's fingers to a wooden floor, one by one. When that didn't produce the desired result, he hammered a six inch nail through the palm of each of his hands, crucifixion style. The victim spent most of one whole night in this agonizing state, until Cahill finally relented. "The bollix is innocent," he says in the film. "Nobody could take that much pain without talking."

Despite these horrors, Brendan Gleeson's performance still manages to make a strong case for Cahill as a human being, even in the face of this appalling "physical evidence." The combination of bone-deep authenticity and movie star charisma in Gleeson's performance carries us well beyond "identification" with the character. You don't come out of this movie merely feeling sympathetic toward Martin Cahill, you come feeling that you are him, moving and even talking differently.

The actor is delighted to hear this, because the role cast a powerful spell over him, as well.

"It took me a long time to get rid of him, I'll tell you that," says Gleeson, a sizable but relaxed and articulate man, now in his early 40s. "It took me so long to get at him, too. I had been doing all the reading, listening to all the stories, looking at all this footage, getting all the externals. I got as close as I could externally to Martin Cahill, but he was still somebody else, it was mimicry. I had to find out what was going on inside."

Boorman adds: "A lot of people have said to me, '[The performance] doesn't look like acting.' Brendan just seems to be that person. A lot of people seem to find that disturbing, in rather the way they did with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, where you're taken right inside this sort of perverted character. I understand that discomfort, but to me that was the most interesting thing about making the film, to go on that journey."

Paul Williams, who met Cahill on several occasions, confirms that Gleeson's resemblance to Cahill is "uncanny." Visiting the set one day, the journalist's nine year son spotted the actor in costume and exclaimed, "Da, look, the General is alive!"

There is no discernible trace of aloofness or self-consciousness in Gleeson's portrayal. He seems to be fully present on the screen, as a man just like us. A truck driver could look at this open-faced lug and think: "He's no toff. He sees things the way I do." This may be what the folks back home were thinking when they dubbed Gleeson "the Irish Depardieu." ("I always felt he was more like James Cagney," director Boorman submits. "The vitality, the drive. Certainly I thought of White Heat when I was making The General.")

Best known as Mel Gibson's fiercely-bearded compatriot Hamish, in Braveheart, Gleeson's star is rising fast. Between the time The General was shot and its US debut at the New York Film Festival in September, a prodigious buzz was already building. A pair of Irish indie productions, I Went Down (in which he played a jaunty small-time gangster) and Sweetie Barrett (featured at the recent AFI fest) had helped spread the word. Gleeson has just finished shooting his first Hollywood movie role, as a Yank, in the monster-alligator thriller Lake Placid.

Gleeson came by his man-of-the-people demeanor the old fashioned way: by working for it. Although he has been acting off and on since his school days, he also toiled full time as a high school teacher until 1989, and took up acting professionally only in his 30s.

"I got started kind of late," he allows, "although I certainly don't regret that I had a normal life before I got into this business. The experience of working nine to five, in the expectation that this is going to be your life, that helps me to explore people whose lives are similar. If there's one thing that's been consistent with me it's a sense of curiosity. I've always been curious about how other people carry on. As an artist that's really the main thing that I have to give, that I can put people in the position to understand the other person's point of view. That doesn't mean to condone it, it just means to not see them as alien creatures."

It was this attitude, as much as anything else, that made Gleeson a good fit for the movie John Boorman intended to make. He was determined not to depict Cahill either as a monster or as a folk hero but simply as a human being whose life took a lamentable turn.

Gleeson found the key he was looking for in a letter quoted in Paul Williams' book, written by the young Martin Cahill to one of the Catholic monks who ran the reform school he was packed off to in his teens. One line caught the actor's eye: "You made me feel as though I was free, in other words, wanted," Cahill wrote.

"The fact that he could tie the feeling of freedom with liberation, that was him," Gleeson says. "When he was in his own community and he was needed or wanted, then he was free. Certainly the general society just gave him the back of its hand. The fact that he knew he was bright and everybody dismissed him as a sewer rat, that rankled all his life. I felt there was always an errant adolescent in Martin's behavior. All the time deliberately crossing the line, but wanting his father to see it. He wanted to get away with it, but he also wanted it to be noted that he had done it."

It was never enough for Cahill just to out fox the police at every turn; he had to rub their noses in it. Among Cahill's sartorial trademarks were undergarments decorated with the cartoon image of Mickey Mouse, a snide reference to his opinion of officialdom. In the movie, pictures of a dancing pig are substituted on Cahill's cop-taunting tee-shirts and boxer shorts.

The pig images work well in the movie, especially in a sequence in which Cahill's men dig holes in the greens of a golf course favored by the Garda’ brass, and leave one of the General's undershirts flapping in the breeze, like a flag marking conquered territory. But according to Boorman, the pig wasn't substituted because it seemed a stronger anti-police icon than Mr. Mouse. I called up Disney," he reports, "and they said, 'Don't even think about it, unless you want to have your film impounded and spend the next five years in court.' So we just concocted this thing of the pigs. Even if I'd won in the end, it would have been a disaster for me."

Cahill's antic behavior didn't win over all the factions of Irish society. Famously, and fatally, he rubbed the Irish Republican Army the wrong way. A review of Paul Williams' book, published in 1995 in the IRA newspaper An Phoblacht (Republican News), takes issue with the writer's portrayal: "Cahill was a different type from the lovable rogue painted by Williams. Cahill was an evil, vindictive man, and some of the episodes recounted ... do no justice to the savagery involved in those events..."

Boorman puts a copy of the review aside and shakes his head. "I was quite happy to have an opportunity to take a dig at the IRA," he declares, "because they have been involved in Mafia-like activities. Even during the present cease fire they're continuing with their beatings of people who are supposed to be doing drugs. They see it as their role to protect the Nationalist society against wrongdoers.

"The big gripe they had against The General was when the UVF [the Ulster Volunteer Force, the major pro-British paramilitary group] blew up a pub that was an IRA meeting place, and they believed that because Cahill had sold some stolen paintings to the UVF he must have helped them with this bombing. And he may well have done, I have no idea. But that was why they took him out."

Boorman is quick to add that in his view Cahill was neither pro- or anti-IRA in any political sense: "His attitude was that the IRA was simply another institution, with rules, and he was so anarchic that he just lumped them in with all the others. The closest I got to him, really, was through his sister, Oona, and his sister said that Martin believed that the whole of society was corrupt and that capitalism was all about theft---whether this was just to justify his actions or not, who's to say?"

Cahill's greatest offense may have been his failure to take the IRA's high moral pretensions seriously. "There was the whole business of the IRA supporting the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement," Boorman explains. "I think they were really aggravated by the way in which Cahill dealt with that movement, getting all these criminals to demonstrate under the banner of Concerned Criminals Against Drugs"---referring to a mock protest march engineered by The General, a street-theater spoof of the IRA effort.

"The IRA," Boorman adds dryly, "have always lacked a sense of humor."

The film also implies that the Irish police may have winked at Cahill's murder, intentionally stepping aside at a crucial moment and allowing the execution to proceed. Cahill had been under continuous police surveillance for months but in the movie the round the clock watch appears to have been lifted the night before the shooting---which just happened to occur just one day before the cease fire of 1994 was to go into effect. "The shooting of Martin Cahill was the last action the IRA took before the cease fire," Boorman notes.

Journalist Williams dismisses any implication of a conspiracy. "We're involved in a delicate stage of the peace process in Ireland," he says, "and you have to realize how very, very sensitive it would be to suggest that the Garda’ and the IRA colluded. There is no evidence of that. Quite the opposite. Those fellows bleeping hate each other." (Colorful Irish expletive deleted.)

Williams also notes that the 24-hour police surveillance of Cahill was lifted in 1987, seven years before the shooting---not the night before, as depicted in the movie.

The director admits that "the question of the collusion of the police is very tricky." In fact, the film never makes this charge directly. It is presented only as an angry outburst hurled at Jon Voight's Ned Kenny by a grieving relative. But Boorman thinks the claim has some validity:

"I met with a member of the Irish Parliament, who happened to be passing by in the street just before the assassination. His car came to a stop and he looked out the window right into the face of the assassin, who was holding a plastic bag with a gun in it." (Williams' account has the hitman waiting for his victim "beside the Stop sign at the junction of Oxford Road and Charleston Road in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh.") "The MP gave the police a description of this man: Short cropped fair hair, clean shaven, sort of square face. When the police sketch of the suspect came out, it was of a man with a narrow face, black hair, and a beard. So the witness went back and said, 'This is nothing like the description I gave you.' And the response was, 'Ah, these sketch artists, they always get it wrong!' I felt that was sufficient corroborative evidence to at least drop a hint or two that something might have happened."

A plausible motive isn't far to seek, Boorman says: "Cahill was getting into kidnapping, and he let it be known that he had a list of his top ten potential kidnap victims, big figures in politics, and many of the wealthy. It's quite possible that at that point there was a sort of a nudge and a wink to the chief constable [that the time had come to get rid of him.]"

Williams disputes this portion of Boorman's account. "I think he may be mistaken," the reporter said. "I was the first journalist on the murder scene and I can tell you, there was no Member of Parliament on the scene, there was no plastic bag, and there was never an Identikit photo of any suspect. I have great respect for John Boorman, he's a brilliant moviemaker, but in this matter he seems to be a bit confused."

Martin Cahill was, according to The General, a man for whom crime was more than a way to make a quick buck. It was his passion, his life's work; a true vocation. From the start, The General evokes the exhilaration of crime, in scenes of the young Martin (played by Eamon Owens, who had the title role in Neil Jordon's The Butcher Boy), whooping through the streets of the Hollyfield Buildings housing project on larcenous errands that are indistinguishable from boyish pranks. We also see how the behavior is reinforced in this setting: any defiance of authority is applauded. When Martin brings home stolen food items, his family is apparently delighted by the windfall.

As an adult, Cahill the fat cat occasionally still rises from the dinner table and glides off into the night for a spot of cat-burglery, moving in rapt silence through a luxurious house, peeking in on the snoozing residents, and pawing through their private trinkets, as a plaintive Van Morrison tune, "This Must Be Paradise," rises on the soundtrack. As he moves wraith-like through the shadows of other people's lives, the mood is sensuous, almost erotic.

"He really did have this extraordinary ability," Boorman says, "a gift for stillness. If he was surprised during a robbery he would go into a closet and just stand there absolutely motionless for hours."

No sensible person would assert that Martin Cahill actually led his life as a modern day Celtic chieftain. But it may be worth considering what a person of Cahill's attributes could have become if he hadn't wandered down the dark path. For Brendan Gleeson, Cahill's life has an element of tragedy; that a person of such vitality, intelligence and self-discipline came to squander those gifts, to cause enormous suffering, and to die bleeding in the street. In order to dramatize the waste, of course, the good qualities have to be portrayed along with the bad, and a perfect balance between the two is bound to be difficult to strike.

"The final thought you have to have," Gleeson says, "is just, what a waste. What a bloody awful bleeping waste."

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