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The General
Reviewed by Leonard Heldreth, October, 1999

Part of the fun of I Went Down is to watch Gleeson's performance as Bunny, the small-time hoodlum, and then compare that to his starring role as Ireland's chief desperado in John Boorman's The General. Gleeson has appeared in Braveheart, The Butcher Boy, Michael Collins and other films. Here he creates a character who, despite his complete amorality and violence, remains true to his own beliefs and keeps the audience on his side. The film is based on the life story of Martin Cahill, the master criminal who controlled Dublin's organized crime in the late '80s and early '90s. Cahill stole over sixty million dollars during his career and is said to have broken into the house of director Boorman and stolen a gold record, a scene which appears in the film. Apparently for selling some rare artwork to the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force, or perhaps for interfering with the drug trade, Cahill was assassinated by the IRA in 1994, an event which both opens and closes the film, with Cahill's life then given in flashback. Eamonn Owens, the young star of The Butcher Boy (reviewed last month) plays young Cahill, and then Gleeson takes over, giving a performance that may receive an Oscar nomination.
  Cahill is a family man with a large group of kids, some by his wife Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and some by his wife's sister, Tina (Angeline Ball), with whom the wife shares him in a curious relationship. Cahill is capable of being a loving father and of weeping over the death of his pigeons, but he is also capable of nailing a man through his hands to a pool table to get information from him. Gleeson manages to convey the complexities of this character while yet showing him as a man who stole simply for his own pleasure and who was unequivocally against the Establishment, whether it took the form of the police, the church, or the IRA.
  Gleeson is matched by Jon Voight playing with a perfect accent the role of Ned Kenny, the police officer brought in to bring Cahill down. He realizes at the end that he has sunk to Cahill's level in an attempt to destroy him, and when the removal of police from Cahill's house permits the IRA assassination, he says to the cheering policemen, "This is no victory for us." All of the other acting is solid with Adrian Dunbar especially good as Cahill's henchman who may or may not have betrayed him at the end.
  Director John Boorman has an impressive body of films, and while The General may not match his Deliverance, it is clearly up there among his better films: Excalibur, Point Blank, and Hope and Glory. Perhaps it is not coincidental that this is the first time he and Voight have worked together again since Deliverance. Boorman chose to shoot the film in color and then print it in black and white, to deglamorize the figure of Cahill and to give the film a documentary quality. Unfortunately, the videotape release didn't get rid of all of the color, and an occasional pastel tone mars what would otherwise be beautiful black and white photography. I'm told the DVD version gets rid of these errant colors.

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