THE GENERAL (65)

Directed by: John Boorman

Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Jon Voight, Adrian Dunbar, Angeline Ball

The Pitch: The story of Martin Cahill, aka "the General", a notorious Dublin criminal - hounded by the cops, loved by the people, and finally murdered by the IRA.

Theo Sez: A companion-piece of sorts to this director's HOPE AND GLORY (and it's nice to see Sebastian Rice-Edwards' name in the credits, the young star of GLORY all grown up now and working on Boorman's crew) - bringing a kind of tough-minded, edgy irreverence to a subject usually associated with Statements and homilies. The subject in this case is crime, which - in the person of the titular hero, a salt-of-the-earth, Robin-Hood-of-Dublin type - becomes both a form of social protest and an expression of anarchic freedom, our hero both stubbornly bolshie, forever kicking against the pricks (refusing eviction, he camps out on the property after his home is demolished till the authorities agree to his demands), but also stubbornly joky, playing the naughty schoolboy with the cops and wearing goofy T-shirts with slogans like "I Don't Do Mornings" : the message, as in much of Boorman's work (EXCALIBUR, like HOPE AND GLORY, is infused with a similar spirit), is that mischievous iconoclasm is the best way of approaching Life, more important than politics (a lethal irrelevance here) or the highbrow concept of "Art" (which is what - indirectly - brings about our hero's downfall). The film happily joins in with the General's light-heartedness (clearly, with this title, the strong comic element is no accident), focusing on a "Please Do Not Touch the Paintings" sign as our hero and his cohorts raid an art-gallery in the background, but it also casts a melancholy shadow over his cut-short life, finding something elegaic in the black-and-white images of this puzzling, elusive man, afraid of no-one and destroyed only when deprived of the thing most vital to his being - his freedom. A powerful ode to individualism, if nothing else - a little samey and strident as it keeps repeating its main point, but it's a point worth repeating ; and Gleeson, coming on like a bizarre combination of Bob Hoskins and Benny Hill, is a hugely distinctive presence.