The Informer **** (1935, Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster) – Classic Movie Review 2133

John Ford’s four-Oscar-winning 1935 film The Informer has not worn too well, straining for effect, while Victor McLaglen’s acting is a faded gem. But The Informer is still a considerable achievement and an admired cinema landmark.

Director John Ford’s four-Oscar-winning 1935 movie version of the Liam O’Flaherty novel The Informer is set in 1920 at the time of the Irish War of Independence. It stars Victor McLaglen as hard-drinking, slow-witted simpleton Gypo Nolan in 1922 Dublin, who has been kicked out of the IRA for not executing a Black and Tan who killed an IRA man.

He finds that his destitute sweetheart Katie (Margot Grahame) has been reduced to prostitution, and betrays his former IRA comrade Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford), a fugitive with a £20 bounty on his head, to pay for passage to America for him and Katie to start afresh.

Of course, it is no surprise that Irish-American film director Ford (1894 – 1973) finds the Irish material and O’Flaherty’s study in betrayal and guilt exactly to his taste and is inspired by it. But it is more surprising that he shoots his film in the studio in a claustrophobic, artificial, French-cinema influenced style. Cinematographer Joseph H August’s atmospheric lighting and imaginative cinematography illuminate the doom-laden, fog-shrouded sets. It works very well.

The Informer was nominated for six Oscars, winning four, at the eighth Academy Awards. McLaglen’s boisterous, swaggering, uproarious acting tour-de-force won him a Best Actor Oscar, surprisingly beating Charles Laughton, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone for the fondly-regarded Mutiny on the Bounty. Ford was rewarded with Best Director and Dudley Nichols won Best Screenplay, but turned it down because of union disagreements, the first time an Oscar was declined. Max Steiner won the Oscar for Best Score for the first time. The film was nominated for Outstanding Production as well as for Best Film Editing.

Ford’s Westerns have proved more enduring – a 1997 revival showed that The Informer had not worn too well, straining uncomfortably as it does for effect, meaning and significance, while McLaglen’s acting is also a faded gem. But, nevertheless, The Informer is still a very considerable achievement and an admired cinema landmark.

Also in the cast are Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Margot Grahame, Una O’Connor, J M Kerrigan, Joe Sawyer, Donald Meek, Neil Fitzgerald, D’Arcy Corrigan, Leo McCabe, Gaylord Pendleton, Francis Ford, May Boley, Grizelda Harvey, Dennis O’Dea, Jack Mulhall, Robert Parrish, Clyde Cook, Barlow Boreland, Frank Moran and Arthur McLaglen.

The Informer was very popular. It cost $243,000, earned $950,000 and made a profit of $325,000.

The novel was previously made as a British film in 1929 both as a silent film and as a part-talkie as The Informer with Lars Hansen, and was remade in 1968 by Jules Dassin with an all-black cast as Uptight.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2133

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