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"The Ireland of dark deeds performed with a light heart," it calls for and gets the pure Archers style. (Powell and Pressburger repay the tribute royally in Ill Met by Moonlight.) British rule and resistance ca. 1815, fancy carriages and the highwaymen who hold them up along green expanses. "What's this, my man?" "Robbery, milord. In a good cause." The rogue (Rock Hudson) breaks with passive rebels and rides off to Dublin, the vicar who helps him evade guards turns out to be the revolutionary leader known as Thunderbolt (Jeff Morrow), the lad becomes his impetuous second-in-command. (His own sobriquet, Lightfoot, is bestowed upon him by Barbara Rush as the capricious belle on whose toes he treads at a grand ball.) Alliances and betrayals, skirmishes and escapes and, of course, disguises. "Each man wears a mask against his fellows." A lambent romantic adventure, Douglas Sirk's unofficial second Western and an open-air intermission between suffocating American households. The dream Ireland of Yeats and Ford analytically treated, the realm of fisticuffs with burly champions and songs remembered by old pirates, also of a struggle to be passed on "to our children and grandchildren." Challenged to a duel, the cheeky hero flusters his opponent by lighting a cigar mid-shootout; captured by the authorities, he shrugs off threats of being sent away to an Australian penal colony: "I've always wanted to travel." A child's toy boat under dragoon hooves, the snappily-dressed scarecrow that takes a bullet, lovers on the beach sharing the CinemaScope screen with a harp plucked by Finlay Currie back in his Great Expectations eye-patch. Cimino borrows the rascally monikers for his first film, and recomposes the rest for The Sicilian. With Kathleen Ryan, Denis O'Dea, Geoffrey Toone, Hilton Edwards, Charles B. Fitzsimons, Philip O'Flynn, Christopher Casson, Shay Gorman, and Harold Goldblatt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |