Alfred Hitchcock's "Juno and the Paycock"Author(s): Jack MorganSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1994), pp. 212-216Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484621 .

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Jack Morgan

Alfred Hitchcock's Juno and the

Paycock

"It was to begin at dawn with the opening of the gates and end at

midnight as they closed again to the twelve chimes of Big Ben...." So

Sean O'Casey imagined, in 1930, the start and conclusion of the film

The Green Gates, to be set in London and directed by the already acclaimed young director Alfred Hitchcock. O'Casey's interest in the cinema was to be short-lived, however. The play, never to be

translated to film, eventually emerged titled Within the Gates, and the

playwright returned to his single-minded and pre-eminent devotion to the stage.

For the moment, though, the idea for this film fascinated him, and

he envisioned big things in the offing:

He had written to Alfred Hitchcock to come and have dinner with them, so

they could talk it over, and Hitchcock had agreed. Hurrah! Eileen got out the handsomest tablecloth they had, and laid the table with their best dinner set, one kept for state

occasions, or for particular friends, with a bottle of wine looking like an awkward jewel in the table's centre; for Sean and Eileen

had secret visions that this coming talk might bring money worries to an end for a

long time.1

O'Casey was not entirely presumptuous here; he had known Hitch

cock for over a year, worked with him, and they had got along

very well indeed. He thought the dinner went gloriously ? animated

conversation with the British director regarding the Green Gates

project and stage/film matters generally. The departing Hitchcock,

"bubbling with excitement" and looking forward, it seemed, to further

discussions along the same lines, invited the O'Caseys to dinner the

following week. Mrs Hitchcock would let them know the specific night. But Mrs Hitchcock, O'Casey noted, had "kept a dead silence"

the whole otherwise hospitable evening. No communication from her was forthcoming, and the brief Hitchcock-O'Casey collaboration was

at an end.2

But there would be one film to show for it ? Hitchcock's adap tation of Juno and the Paycock

? produced earlier that year. While

initially well-received, a popular success, it would pretty much fade

into obscurity over time, remarked only by Hitchcock film buffs for

1. O'Casey, Autobiographies 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 352.

2. Ibid., pp. 352-53.

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK

the most part, and then as a distinctly minor item in the director's oeuvre. It would also, until recently, be a work difficult to come by. That is a situation remedied lately, though, by the movie's release,

along with a number of Hitchcock's other early works, on video tape,3 which may lead to some renewed interest. The film has, for one thing, begun to show up as part of Hitchcock retrospectives in university film series here and there.

The standard view among Hitchcock critics has been that his Juno is, as the director himself observed, "uncinematic", a stage piece carried over intact into film, presented essentially the way it was on

the boards. There is even a tendency among these critics more

concerned with Hitchcock's reputation than O'Casey's to blame the

play for the film's perceived shortcomings, to regard Juno, in fact,

condescendingly, and to assume Hitchcock did so too. Donald Spoto, for example, describes O'Casey's play as "a talky melodrama", and

the film as an "assignment" Hitchcock was given by British Inter

national Films, one completed in "a most perfunctory manner", and one for which Hitchcock and his wife, co-writing the screenplay, could

barely muster any enthusiasm.4

In their Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (1979) the pioneering French Hitchcock critics Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol are likewise

all too dismissive of O'Casey's play in their effort to rationalise Hitch

cock's rather lacklustre adaptation. The film version of Juno and the

Paycock, they declare, "pitilessly underscored ... the bathos and weak

ness of Sean O'Casey's construction."5 And they are apparently more

knowledgeable about Hitchcock than they are about O'Casey. Failing to recognise that the fabric of the working-class Irish culture reflected

in O'Casey's play was pervaded by Catholic expression, imagery,

iconography and idiom to a degree unknown in France, Chabrol and

Rohmer seem to labour under the illusion that O'Casey was a Roman

Catholic, no less, and a devout, orthodox one at that ? indeed one

willing to use his art to "proselytise". According to them, the Catholic

Hitchcock ? who could even arguably be designated a "Catholic

auteur" they maintain ? found O'Casey's "Irish Catholic mystique"

embarrassing, lacking in the ambiguity and subtlety that were Hitch

cock's own hallmarks.6

There is furthermore a marked tendency among film critics to

overstate the degree to which Hitchcock was strictly faithful to the

author's original version. The job Hitchcock was given, Rohmer and

3. ?uno and the Paycock, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Vol. 10 (Quebec: Madacy Music

Group, 1993). 4. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The life of Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Little

Brown, 1983), p. 123.

5. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (New York: Ungar, 1979), p. 25. 6. Ibid., p. 26.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Chabrol argue, called for "absolute fidelity", and as a consequence the film emerged as "merely photographed theater."7 This accepted

wisdom is a half-truth at best and has more to do with the film's for

the most part rigid, unimaginative camera work than it does with

Hitchcock's adherence to O'Casey's text. Clearly, if Juno and the

Paycock is known for anything, it is for its extraordinary closure, its

jarring, Beckettian, final scene following upon Juno's prayer. Gabriel

Fall?n remembered the effect this stunning scene had on the audience

at the Abbey dress rehearsal of 2 March 1924, Barry Fitzgerald as

Captain Boyle and F.J. McCormick as Joxer:

... Suddenly the curtain rises again:

are Fitzgerald and

McCormick fooling, letting off steam after the strain of rehearsal?

Nothing of the kind; for we in the stalls are made to freeze in our seats as a note beyond tragedy, a blistering, flannel mouthed

irony sears its maudlin way across the stage and drops an

exhausted curtain on a world disintegrating in 'chassis'.8

"It was the blistering irony of the final scene," Fall?n noted, "that

convinced me that this man sitting two seats in front of me was a

dramatist of genius...." Hitchcock ? so much for absolute fidelity ?

left this scene out of the movie.

Doing so meant, for one thing, that the film version ended with

Juno's (Sara Allgood's) "Sacred Heart of Jesus, take away our hearts of

stone...." lines. Which would surely fly in the face of the Rohmer

Chabrol contention that Hitchcock was uncomfortable with the

"Catholicism" of O'Casey's play, would argue, if anything, that Hitch

cock catholicised what had been a comparatively bleak, nihilistic

ending and diminished the play's irony and ambiguity thereby. Nor did the director retain Barry Fitzgerald, who created the role at

the Abbey and clearly would have been O'Casey's choice, as Captain

Boyle. Altering the play's beginning as well as its end, Hitchcock gave

Fitzgerald a very minor role, not much more than that of an extra, as

the street-corner orator in an opening scene that was not part of the

stage production. Edward Chapman, who replaced Fitzgerald for

the movie, played Boyle one-dimensionally, without the required

panache, and was overwhelmed by the brilliant Allgood. In Sean

(1971) Eileen O'Casey described her and her husband's disappoint ment at Hitchcock's "curious oversight" in recasting the Captain Boyle

role at Fitzgerald's expense:

We grieved that he had not a more testing part in the Hitchcock film.... The mistake was Barry's relegation from the Paycock:

an

7. Ibid., pp. 25-6.

8. Sean O'Casey: The Man I Knew (Boston: Little Brown, 1965), p, 22.

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK

unpardonable Hitchcock blunder as the actor cast for the part was

in no way comparable to the other players.9

There were many other differences between Hitchcock's film pro duction and O'Casey's original, most of them minor ones. In the

filmed version of the celebration scene, for instance, Mary and Mrs

Boyle sing "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms" as

opposed to the less familiar "Home to Our Mountains" sung in the

second act of the play. And Juno's solo rendition of a verse from "If I

Were a Blackbird" is cut. For another thing, in the play the infor

mation that the family's anticipated inheritance is not to be after all is

revealed by the tailor, "Needles" Nugent, who, concerned about the

seven pounds Boyle owes him for a suit, has gone to the solicitor and

discovered the truth. Hitchcock anticipates that scene with another more cinematic one in which the Captain is shown, disappointed and

crestfallen, descending the stairs from Charles Bentham's office. These

are, again, small things, well within the generally accepted range of

prerogatives open to a director adapting a literary work. But there was

another less benign change wrought by Hitchcock upon O'Casey's

original, one more in the nature of tampering.

Nugent the tailor, so keen to get his seven pounds and the most

aggressive of the many Boyle creditors, was transformed by Hitch

cock, quite gratuitously, from an Irishman into a stereotypical Jew

(one "Mr Kelly"). In his fi*st appearance he is shot in extreme close up,

whispering to Joxer Daly. The scene is shadowy, conspiratorial, and

the tailor (Fred Schwartz) is drawn ? intentionally it is clear ? with

dark, Shylockian overtones, the camera lingeringly preoccupied with

his ample, middle-eastern nose. In fact, the intention to malign is so

manifest in this scene that it infects the rest of the tailor portrayal which perhaps might otherwise have been written off as merely in

poor taste. Hitchcock thus introduced anti-semitism, all the fashion in

nineteen-thirties Europe, into O'Casey's work, much to O'Casey's later surprise and displeasure. (Hitchcock's next film, Murder!, which

appeared the same year, would have a dubious "racial impurity"

angle woven into its homicide.) When the tailor, having discovered, as he tells Joxer, that "de whole vill is a vashout," retrieves his suit

from Boyle's apartment, his response to the Captain's protests is the

predictable stage-Jewish: "Oy, such a nerve!" Nugent's lines in the

O'Casey version: "I'm tellin' you seven pounds aren't to be found

growin' in the bushes these days," are rendered thus by Hitchcock's

tailor: "Believe me you vill, believe me you von't ? seven pounds ain't gonna be found growin on no bush...." And so forth.

Astonishingly enough, until 1955 O'Casey, never having seen the

9. Sean (London: Macmiilan, 1971), p. 105.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

movie, was completely unaware that Hitchcock had thus altered the play. In that year, Charles Rosenburg and Martin Kesselman of Madison, Wisconsin, having seen the now rarely shown Juno,

probably at a university showing, wrote to O'Casey in justified indig nation, protesting the "whimsically vicious anti-semitic caricature."10

His return letter of 23 March, 1955 reveals his complete dismay as to

what they could possibly be referring to. In fact he is so convinced no

such thing occurs in the film that he assumes, throughout his letter, that Rosenburg and Kesselman must somehow be mistaken: "Did you see it yourselves, or were you just told about it?" Astonishing too is

his revelation that, while he had not seen the film, no one who had

had ever mentioned an anti-semitic caricature in it. The film, he notes, "was shown everywhere, and no word or whisper came about any stated or implied bias against the Jew....n

His basic assumption in the letter is that either the pair who wrote to him are somehow mistaken or someone has maliciously altered the

original film. He is mystified:

The one version of JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK in film form was done twenty-five years ago, the producer

was Hitchcock.... There

was no conception in it such as you describe. Kelly wasn't the

name of the character, but Nugent.... The film rights to JUNO are

mine alone ... I should be glad if you could let me have the full

details. Are you sure that it was JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK? Was it maybe a film that copied some of the material from the

original one; and done under another name, changing it a lot,

including the name Kelly, the tailor for that of Nugent? It must be a different one....12

He is clearly unaware of the illegitimate liberty Hitchcock had taken

with his play more than two decades earlier. But he had no

enthusiasm for the film business anyway after his friendship with

Hitchcock and his hopes for The Green Gates dissolved. He rejected even a proposal for another Juno film, this one from John Huston,

though it would have restored Barry Fitzgerald to the starring role. "... Barry's brother, Arthur Shields, wrote me a long letter appealing for my consent," he later informed his American agent, "but I refused to have anything to do with it."13

10. The Letters of Sean O'Casey 1955-1958, Vol. Ill, David Krause (ed.) (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1989), p. 91, n. 1.

11. Ibid., Letter to Rosenberg and Kesselman, pp. 91-2. 12. Ibid., pp. 91-2.

13. Ibid., Letter to Miss Jane Rubin, p. 417.

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