A Hanging Matter

The Quare Fellow, based on the play by Ireland's Brendan Behan, is a funny tragedy, a happy-go-lucky horror show, a gay little wake for the dead who have died in the name of justice--the kind of justice that demands a life for a life. Like the play, the picture ignores the rational arguments against capital punishment. It simply takes its audience inside an Irish prison and bolts the gate; and then with a world of Irish charm and humor shows everybody round the dear old place, shows everybody how it feels to live in a cell--and die on a rope.

The plot is unimportant: an old guard (Walter Macken) and a young guard (Patrick McGoohan) wait tensely for a reprieve to arrive for the quare fellow (prison slang for a condemned man), and when it fails to arrive they lead him grimly to the gallows. What matters is the compelling illusion of life as it is lived in an average anachronistic prison: the natural humanity of the prisoners and their guards, the subhuman system that makes them beasts and keepers, the soul-destroying hatred of either for other, the teeth that glitter cruelly behind every smile, the moral stench of slowly rotting lives, the wit honed to a cutting edge on iron bars.

Prison Official: "I have never seen a hanging. A painful duty."

Old Guard: "Neck breaking and throttling, sir? I've seen rather a lot of it. And they say familiarity breeds contempt."

Official: "There's one consolation. The condemned man gets the sacraments. Some of them die holier deaths than if they'd finished their natural span."

Guard: "Commit murder and die happy, is that what you mean, sir? But we can't advertise that, now can we. They'd all be doin' it. They take religion seriously in this country, y'know."

But what is said hurts less than what is seen: the hangman officiously computing the hemp required for his grisly business, the doomed man dumbly waiting for the noose with his head tied up in a sack--the eyes, it is said, pop out sometimes and roll around on the floor.

Behan is frankly polemical, and Arthur Dreifuss, who both wrote and directed the picture, has done nothing to mitigate the playwright's opinions. On the other hand, Behan brings to his special pleading a special experience and a special authority. He has spent nearly six of his 40 years in jail. One feels that his convictions have been fortified by convictions.

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