Shake Hands with the Devil, 1959.
Directed by Michael Anderson.
Starring James Cagney, Don Murray, Dana Wynter, Glynis Johns and Michael Redgrave.
SYNOPSIS:
In 1920s Dublin, a young medical student is sucked into the world of the IRA and becomes embroiled in a series of plots against the occupying British forces.
No first sentence tricks this time. Let’s go straight in there. It’s Northern Ireland in 1921, and those infamous Troubles with a capital T are in full swing. Faced with guerrilla tactics and a relentless resolve from the Irish Republican Army, the British Government have sent in the contemptible Black and Tans, a paramilitary outfit with express orders to shoot anyone even remotely suspicious-looking on sight. They function as an occupying force, as a catch-all term for British oppression in Ireland, and as the nameless, faceless target practice villains in this story.
Easy there now. Shake Hands with the Devil isn’t going to be such a straightforward good versus evil story as all that. It takes our boy Kerry O’Shea (Don Murray) half the runtime to make up his mind to pick a side or not. He’s an American studying medicine at the College of Surgeons in Dublin, quite determined to be apolitical. Having seen men die in ditches in their thousands in France, he’s not about to wade into another bloodbath if he can help it.
That’s just his problem, as it happens. He can’t help it. Simply living in Dublin means he’s walking daily through a battleground. He can’t so much as visit his poor departed mother without getting caught up in a graveyard shootout. Which, by the way, makes for an incredible, visually arresting opening scene, rich with powerful images – military ambushes, coffins full of guns, priests running for cover from hails of gunfire between the tombstones. This is total war, and O’Shea refuses to have any part in it.
Eventually, he gets into a situation that forces him to show his colours; in defense of his friend Paddy, he introduces a Tan’s nose to the butt of a rifle. Paddy’s shot, and they must call out a qualified surgeon to save him. And who should turn up but their own Professor, Sean Lenihan (James Cagney). O’Shea can’t go back to his ordinary life after what he’s done; he must go underground with Lenihan and the IRA until he can find safe passage out of Ireland.
It doesn’t take long to see why Lenihan is knee-deep in this war; he’s a natural leader, quick thinking and charismatic. He’s fiery and idealistic and it seems like there’s not a man alive he’s afraid of. You imagine you’ll spend the film looking for Cagney-isms, spotting the tough guy clichés. Not a bit of it. Cagney is no John Wayne. He all but disappears into his character; there’s not a moment you don’t believe in a man called Sean Lenihan.
There’s a reason Cagney was beloved by directors like Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles. Welles in particular admired him above all other actors, as he once told Michael Parkinson: “He broke every rule about movie acting…Cagney came on as though he were playing to an audience of forty five hundred people. He acted at the top of his bent, and he never hammed for one moment, thus proving my point that hamming is not over-acting. It’s false acting. It’s fakery. And there’s not a fake minute in a Cagney movie.”
Trust Orson Welles to say it best. With every second of this performance, Cagney all but breathes fire, tearing up the screen with an intensity you can’t even begin to anticipate without seeing it for yourself. Watch him face off against Michael Redgrave’s General, furious at the proposition of a treaty with the British: “That’s not peace – that’s surrender!” He’s constantly on the edge, a man of action so, so tightly wound he might break any second.
Director Michael Anderson knows exactly the kind of actor he’s dealing with. He and Cagney, it seems, prove more than a match for one another. As a result, we’re dealt one classic cinema moment after another; a shot of Lenihan framed in the cell door springs immediately to mind, as he’s silhouetted by the light of dawn behind him, a Bible in his hand for the British hostage he intends to execute.
Anderson shoots death scenes with a distinctive flair, keen not to gloss over the gravity of a moment just because he can’t use gunshot squibs. A body falling toward the camera in close-up, lifeless and defeated, is a particular triumph of his technical genius.
Another unforgettable scene comes with O’Shea’s interrogation at the hands of Colonel Smithson (Christopher Rhodes) of the Black and Tans. Cinema fans might remember him best as the lovable Scotsman ‘Mac’ Macgill from The Colditz Story; here we’re introduced to a faceless torturer, jabbing at the camera with a ringed fist. We become O’Shea. We take every hit with him. We start to feel every bit as vengeful to this Black and Tan uniform as he does. You start to see why Lenihan in particular has become the very thing he took up arms against, as he says thing like “We’re not fighting faces. We’re fighting uniforms.”
Shake Hands with the Devil has a real knack for stirring you up, even making you care about the politics without going full-on jingoistic. We’re thrown in the middle like O’Shea, disgusted with the Black and Tans but also disturbed by the eye-for-an-eye principle Lenihan so readily falls back on. Put it down to a director like Anderson, years ahead of his contemporaries, and a cast perfectly matched to a film where story and spectacle walk hand in hand.
It’s not just Cagney drawing you into it, either. Expect the very finest of ‘50s character actors to make their appearances, from Richard Harris (ever the angry young man) to William “Doctor Who” Hartnell as a gruff Sergeant on road block duty, with a gentle sprinkling of the softly spoken John Le Mesurier to taste.
Don Murray as O’Shea doesn’t do a bad job, but his is arguably the hardest role, making us believe in the good-hearted American fighting somebody else’s war, all in the name of his firebrand Irish father. Dana Wynter and Glynis Johns represent the all-too quiet voice of femininity in these dark times, overshadowed by men and their grenade-throwing-type posturing.
Women here function as hostages for plots to revolve around, and occasional consciences spoken aloud. It’s a fault more typical of the political slant of the story than any prejudices of screenwriting. Johns’ character, an IRA sympathiser, gets a rough deal, all for not being male enough to pick up a rifle and fight with her friends for real. Wynter plays a government official’s daughter, only brought into all this because she makes for a valuable hostage. Wynter brings to life a woman possessed of immense strength of character, her eyes a mirror for the troubled souls who dare stare into them.
Words alone aren’t enough to recommend this kind of film. Ideally, you’d want Jimmy
Cagney to grab you by the lapels and shake you upside down until the change falling out of your pockets spelt out the title of the film. You know this kind of film; the kind you find yourself thinking about some long weeks after you saw it, perhaps sparking up a memory at the sound of harsh words never spoken truer, or in a look from somebody that’s too hard to read in the moment, only to be understood with the clearer lense of hindsight.
Shake Hands with the Devil speaks to the cinephile and the human instinct alike, written and executed with that unmistakable ring of truth we always look for and so rarely find in a film. It looks and sounds and feels all kinds of right, with an ending you had to expect but could never predict. See it as soon as you get the chance.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Simon Moore is a budding screenwriter, passionate about films both current and classic. He has a strong comedy leaning with an inexplicable affection for 80s montages and movies that you can’t quite work out on the first viewing.
