1916 and Other Risings: John Ford’s 'The Plough and the Stars' (1936)

Abstract

John Ford’s Hollywood film of the Easter Rising, The Plough and the Stars (1936), based on Sean O’Casey’s play from ten years earlier, deserves more respect than it has generally been given. Its departures from O’Casey’s text, giving a more positive view of the Rising, were openly debated with him, and can be seen as resulting less in betrayal than in creative dialogue. The film has a clear relation to other inter-war films about historic Revolutions — Russian (Battleship Potemkin, USSR 1925), French (A Tale of Two Cities, US 1935) and American (Ford’s own Drums Along the Mohawk US 1939) — and can be viewed, in retrospect, as a pivotal film within Ford’s career, inspiring him to a fuller and more consistent engagement with Irish themes and with American nation-building narratives, and the interaction between the two.