Mick Micawber

The Luck of Ginger Coffey. Irish he is, and a grand figure of a man indeed. Six feet in his socks and no mush around the middle, mind, for all he's rising 40. The eyes are wild and blue, the face is wide and Irish. The hair is the color of a slightly soiled orangutan, and over the large smile arches an orange mustache such as a man might hang his hat on. The hat, set over at a country angle, is Tyrolean and supports a bright little brush that stands eternally erect. The jacket is tweed and reeks of Irish fog and Irish twist and good green Irish whisky.

Irish, d'y'see, is the word for Ginger Coffey, and at a guess most people put him down as a prosperous Irish squire. Most people, more's the pity, are dead wrong. Behind the mighty mustache hides a terrified tyke. Inside the classy tweeds lives a Mick Micawber who can't keep a job, can't feed his family, can't face the comitragic truth about himself. In his careful and intelligent novel, a bestseller in 1960, and now again in the careful and intelligent script he has written for this film, Author Brian Moore describes with horror, humor and humanity what happens when a middle-aged child wraps his lip around the lollipop of life and finds that it has turned into a stone.

Takes two to make a child, whatever its age, and the child called Ginger (Robert Shaw) is created with the collaboration of Ginger's wife (Mary Ure). For 15 years she plays his mother as well as his mate. When he quits job after job because, as he grandly announces, "I'm too good for that sort of thing," she knows he secretly believes he isn't good enough, but she protects his pride and does not tell him he is a coward. When he takes passage for Canada because, as he grandly announces, "Ireland is too small for me," she knows he secretly feels he's too small for Ireland, bu she protects his pride and does no tell him he is a fool.

In Montreal, however, she runs out of patience at last. In six months she watches Ginger quit three jobs. When he takes a fourth that pays less than a living wage, she grimly walks out and leaves the big baby to look after himself. His efforts are desperate, pathetic, absurd. But he keeps on making them, and slowly, painfully, out of the mess there begins to emerge a man.

The process is interpreted with sensitivity and restraint by Director Irvin Kershner. Actress Ure, who in private life is Mrs. Shaw, manages to be both solidly female and delicately feminine as Mrs. Coffey. And Actor Shaw, known mostly for the stage roles he has played (The Caretaker) and the novels he has written (The Sun Doctor), is Ginger to the life. Brash, frightened, cunning, confused, sentimental, self-indulgent, weak but somehow also fundamentally decent and lovable, Ginger as Shaw sees him is both an individual and a type, an image of the child that is the father (and sometimes the undoing) of every man alive.

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