Word: caseys
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Young Cassidy, most of it derived from the late Sean O'Casey's multi-volume autobiography Mirror in My House, is a shrewd compromise between truth and the blander stuff that makes agreeable popular entertainment. The man himself was a crusty, anticlerical Communist, scarcely the image of a conventional movie hero, though he also happened to be one of the grandest playwrights of the 20th century. Cassidy, filmed in and around Dublin with a wholehearted feel for the gritty poetry of the slums where the author lived and worked at the time of the Troubles, cuts...
Cassidy's prize in one melee is a trollop named Daisy Battles, played by tawny, toothsome Julie Christie, who has a decorative role and makes the most of it. But the girl who steals out of O'Casey's pages into Cassidy's heart -and gives the whole film a persistent, throbbing pulsebeat-is Nora (Maggie Smith), the shy, strong-minded colleen who finally takes leave of him because "I need a small, simple life-without your terrible dreams and your terrible anger." Actress Smith makes even reticence seem a powerful emotion...
...John Casey, whose story, "A Taste of Cherry," begins "I cannot describe to you very well the boarding school," deserves a nod of agreement and a sigh. Lee Grove, a young man distressed by what old men think, rates a prize for non-sequiturs and bad puns. Kevin Lewis, who has written two poems about vapid lives, could be accused of writing method poetry...
...history is only the background for O'Casey's warm, humorous, pathetic characters. Nora and Jack Clitheroe share a Dublin tenement apartment with Peter Flynn, Nora's uncle, and Covey, Jack's cousin. Covey, an international socialist, mocks old Peter, a die-hard Irish nationalist, while Nora attempts to pacify them both. But she cannot control her husband's allegiance to the Citizen Army. He leaves her and dies in the battle...
...Charles Playhouse's excellent production heightens O'Casey's humor, but as an ironic foil for his sadness. The characters' sanguine outlook keeps them from taking themselves or their situation too seriously. They have time for funereal jokes while artillery shells are bursting near them. They take the the edge off their political fervor by going home with a prostitute...