THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: John Ford
SCREENWRITER: Frank S. Nugent
FILM STARS: Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Dianne Foster, Pat O’Brien, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, James Gleason, Edward Brophy, John Carradine, Willis Bouchey, Ricardo Cortez, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, Carleton Young, Edmund Lowe, Dan Herlihy, Anna Lee, Ken Curtis, Jane Darwell
COUNTRY: USA
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Edwin O’Connor
TYPE: Novel
PUBLISHER: Pan
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1959
COUNTRY: Great Britain
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1956
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title
NOTES
GENRE: Political drama
WORDS: I loved this Ford film and his American Irishness (and I’m not Irish). The films’ cast is perfect and there are many motion picture asides and grace notes that are pure John Ford and not in the book or script. The film hints at the reality of politics but is relatively genteel with it’s warm (though admittedly slightly cynical) Fordian humour and emotionalism up front, rather than the political satire of the book. That’s not to say the book doesn’t have its warm humour or emotion.
LINKS
TRAILER
Johnathon Yardley, Washington Post book critic, had a regular column called Second Readings which featured books he re-read after first admiring them years before. Writing about Edwin O’Connor, Yardley said that no one had written about Irish Americans better than he – with that in mind, you can see why John Ford thought ‘The Last Hurrah’ would be a good fit…
“Second Readings” – what a freaking great idea. Though he must a faster reader than me. I struggle just to read new stuff. I do not think I have ever read a book a second time (though there are some I would love to) but I have re-read passages, which have been marked by me and chapters (I’m one of these “vandals” who marks books – though I do it in pencil). I have re-watched childhood favourite movies … and that is always an interesting experience. Hats off to Jonathan Yardley though.