The Time Of The Troubles-Part One-Jimmy’s Hall-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Jimmy’s Hall, starring Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, directed by Ken Loach, 2014  

Forget the Nightmare on Elm’s Street cinematic series, forget the billion Halloween films, forget all the ghoul and horror shows you might have seen in your time this film under review, Jimmy’s Hall, despite its placid sounding title is one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. Why? Well in this film about the deportation of revolutionary stand-up guy Jimmy Grafton from Ireland by the Irish Free State government in 1933 there are several vignettes where the local parish priest, make no mistake the local Roman Catholic parish priest, holds forth in various settings about the damn communists, damn jazz, damn dancing, damn sin, sanctified and to be mercilessly obeyed Mother Church (a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church), and the waywardness of modern world in general. And throw in a couple of jabs at Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union to boot. The scariest scene? Scary evoking shutters in me from my long ago Roman Catholic Church childhood was when the good Father began to spout forth about the wickedness of…..dancing and having fun in this wicked old world, naming the names of the damned who attended the dance in Jimmy’s hall in the process,  and not waiting like chaste boys and girls until the great by and by just like my old good Father did from his pulpit in my youth.     

The battle between Mother Church represented by the good Father (the old codger) and Jimmy Grafton (played by Barry Ward), the local red leader and icon of the democratic free-thinking secular life is thus set early on. Set too around the controversy over reestablishing Jimmy’s hall as a cultural center, a converted barn on the Grafton property which had gone to ground when Jimmy had set sail for America after having been on the wrong side of the Irish Civil War. That wrong side of the Civil War meant that he was in opposition to accepting the British-backed Treaty which gave up the six counties in the North (today’s Northern Ireland) and by the 1930s had established constitutionally the Roman Catholic Church as the state church and as the arbiter of morals and the parameters of social life. (That Civil war reflecting the part one “time of troubles” in the 1920s and not the latter ones of the late 1960s forward). So no question the issues were drawn rather shapely, the question of the North still thorny to this day despite the Peace Accords and the latter question of the power of the Church only recently broken a bit, broken most dramatically over the resounding victory vote on the question of same-sex marriage.                 

And like today’s more secular and tolerant young Irish in Jimmy Grafton’s time it was the youth who had heard faraway rumors that it was okay to dance, to paint, to sing secular songs (in Irish too), to listen to decadent jazz, to cavort in the night, hell, to think who upon Jimmy’s return to Ireland to take care of his aging mother in the Great Depression-torn world clamored for him to reopen the cultural center. And he did. But Ireland then was in the grip of a great darkness after that Civil War had been won not by those who stood by the General Proclamation posted on the Dublin General Post Office wall proclaiming the fight for a democratic secular Ireland come Easter, 1916 but the Church and the larger landlords. Those opponents would first badger and then turn to violence and mayhem to stop Jimmy’s operation.   

In this year of the 100^th anniversary of Easter, 1916, the liberation struggle, this film rather graphically highlights what happens when the laboring people who fought for liberation when it counted don’t win. Jimmy despite his best efforts, and of his mother when it came time for her to act, wound up being a non-person, a non-citizen since he held an American passport. Wound up being deported as an outside agitator and dying in exile in America in 1945. It took a long time to even get half of what Jimmy and his “red” circle were proposing back then and I am willing to bet six, two and even that there is still plenty of opposition in the “old sod” to conceding anything to modern life.

Oh yeah, there is as is almost inevitable a little romantic interplay (nice way to put it, right) between Jimmy and the now married girl he left behind, Oning, played by the fetching Simone Darby, but keep your eyes on the political struggle that is what gives this one five stars. And maybe close your eyes if you don’t want to see that scary scene with the good Father pontificating from the pulpit. Okay.