Irish America

joseph McBride

Film Forum: The Importance of Being Earnest

By Joseph McBride, Contributor
August / September 2002

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Hyping up Wilde in Earnest won't win Parker and Oscars. ℘℘℘ "Life is too important to be taken seriously," Oscar Wilde observed. He demonstrated that principle most dazzlingly in The Importance of Being Earnest, his 1895 play satirizing, among other things, the uselessness of British upper-class twits, the hypocrisy of would-be moral arbiters, the shallowness of social … [Read more...] about Film Forum: The Importance of Being Earnest

Film Forum:
The Importance of Being Earnest

By Joseph McBride, Contributor
August / September 2002

by Leave a Comment

Hyping up Wilde in Earnest won't win Parker and Oscars. ℘℘℘ "Life is too important to be taken seriously," Oscar Wilde observed. He demonstrated that principle most dazzlingly in The Importance of Being Earnest, his 1895 play satirizing, among other things, the uselessness of British upper-class twits, the hypocrisy of would-be moral arbiters, the shallowness of social … [Read more...] about Film Forum:
The Importance of Being Earnest

The Quiet Man Turns Fifty

By Joseph McBride, Contributor
February / March 2002

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This year marks fiftieth anniversary of John Ford's The Quiet Man, the favorite movie of many Irish Americans. The native Irish tend to see it with more ambivalence, yet the readers of the Irish Times in 1996 voted it the greatest Irish movie ever made. The beguiling comedy-drama won Ford his fourth Academy Award as best director, as well as bringing Oscars to cinematographers … [Read more...] about The Quiet Man Turns Fifty

Book Reviews

By Tom Deignan, Columnist
October / November 2001

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RECOMMENDED For decades, one simple question has split the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic into two warring factions: Do you love or loathe The Quiet Man, that 1952 stage Irish classic starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and directed by John Ford? Ford himself was often more Irish than the Irish themselves, making up an ultra-Gaelic name for himself, and playing … [Read more...] about Book Reviews

Film Forum:
Land of the Second Chance

By Joseph McBride, Contributor
August / September 2001

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Once the most popular form of American filmmaking, the Western has not fully recovered from the commercial and critical debacle of Michael Cimino's 1980 epic Heaven's Gate. Although a far better film than conventional wisdom would indicate, Heaven's Gate provoked widespread derision because Cimino dared to use the disreputable Western form for a serious purpose, to question the … [Read more...] about Film Forum:
Land of the Second Chance