Word: aran
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Currently exhibited in the U. S. and recommended by most critics are: The Private Life of Don Juan, The President Vanishes, Babbitt, Babes in Toyland, Broadway Bill, Flirtation Walk, The Battle, The Merry Widow, Man of Aran, Our Daily Bread...
...Aran (Gaumont-British). Director Robert J. Flaherty (Moana of the South Seas, Nanook of the North) is the cinema's No. 1 specialist in elemental-struggle-for-existence sagas. When he heard that the Aran Islands, off the Galway coast of Ireland, were so barren that the inhabitants had to gather soil in baskets to grow potatoes in crevices of rock, he went to England's Gainsborough Pictures Ltd. for financial backing. Man of Aran is the result of his two-year sojourn on Inishmore, largest of the three islands. Decorated with a musical score based on Irish...
Awarded the Mussolini Cup for the best picture at the International Motion Picture Exposition in Venice (TIME, Sept. 24), Man of Aran was exhibited to U. S. audiences for the first time last week. Critics were quick to appreciate its superb pictorial qualities, the honest artistry with which Director Flaherty photographed his characters as heroic dwarfs against the dark, enormous background of a hungry land and a mighty sea. Audiences were equally quick to feel that somehow, in the absence of dramatic line, Man of Aran missed the essence of its subject...
Like those two films, Man of Aran has only a rudimentary plot and no professional actors. Relying on superb photography, a strapping fishwife named Maggie Dirrane (who acted as Flaherty's housemaid between scenes), a handsome child named Michael and a curly-haired fisherman known as Tiger King, the film shows the daily life of the Aran Islanders, their barren homes where garden soil must be gathered in baskets from crevices in the rock, their frail seagoing curraghs of tarred skins stretched over basketwork frames. High spot in the film is the harpooning of a 30-ft. basking shark...
...Eamon de Valera deigned to pay his first visit to a cinema in Ireland for the film's premiere in Dublin.. Most of the Irish Free State Cabinet was also on hand. And smiling behind the fluttering ribbons of his glasses went William Butler Yeats. Man of Aran has not yet been released...