Eat the Peach *** (1986, Stephen Brennan, Eamon Morrissey, Catherine Byrne) – Classic Movie Review 10,765

Co-writer/ director Peter Ormrod’s 1986 film Eat the Peach is an appealing Ealing Studios-style Irish comedy about two jobless young Irish buddies – dreamer Vinnie (Stephen Brennan) and his sidekick Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) – who see Elvis Presley’s 1964 bike movie Roustabout, in which a carnival cyclist performs an act called the Wall of Death, and decide to build a cycle wall of death of their own in their own back yard.

Eat the Peach’s downbeat, amiable whimsy holds the attention with its amusing dialogue, plot, theme and performances, and ends up somewhere between ‘so what’ and entertaining.

The performances and Donal Lunny’s unusual Irish folk score are assets.

Also in the cast are Catherine Byrne, Niall Toibin, Joe Lynch, Tony Doyle, Victoria Armstrong, Barbara Adair, Bernadette O’Neill, Paul Raynor, Martin Dempsey, Jill Doyle and Don Foley.

Writers: Peter Ormrod and John Kelleher. Not many films connect Elvis Presley and T S Eliot, but this one does. The title is taken from T S Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

The song ‘Eat the Peach’ is written by Paul Brady and Donal Lunny and sung by Paul Brady.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,765

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