The Plough and the Stars ** (Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Barry Fitzgerald, Una O’Connor) – Classic Movie Review 9769

The 1936 film The Plough and the Stars is John Ford’s failed labour-of-love version of the Sean O’Casey play about the 1916 Irish rebellion, centring on Nora Clitheroe (Barbara Stanwyck)’s fight to stop her rebel officer husband Jack Clitheroe (Preston Foster) from taking part in the Irish troubles and being a member of the Irish Citizen Army, a socialist Irish republican movement.

Stars, writer Dudley Nichols and Ford make surprisingly little of this prestige enterprise, but helpfully a bunch of authentic players from the Dublin Abbey Theatre take a bow in the cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Denis O’Dea, Eileen Crowe, F J McCormick and Arthur Shields. Barbara Stanwyck’s miscasting is a serious problem. She is too starry and none too Irish.

Also in the cast are Una O’Connor, Moroni Olsen, Bonita Granville, J M Kerrigan, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Neil Fitzgerald, Robert Homans, Brandon Hurst, Mary Gordon and Jack Pennick.

A furious Ford tried unsuccessfully to get RKO to remove his name from the credits after tampering by the RKO studio (scenes were re-shot by George Nicholls Jr) when preview cards suggested the public didn’t care for it. He hated the film, a passion project, proclaiming RKO ‘ruined the damned thing’.

In the spring of 1916, a divided Ireland found thousands fighting the cause of England in World War One, while other thousands remained home planning a fight, under the flag of the Plough and the Stars, to free their country from England.

Arthur Shields fought in the Easter Rising in April 1916.

The Plough and the Stars is directed by John Ford, runs 76 minutes, is made and released by RKO Radio Pictures, is written by Dudley Nichols, is shot in black and white by Joseph H August, is produced by Cliff Reid and Robert Sisk, and is scored by Roy Webb.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9769

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