Blustering and wearying 'Informer'

THE INFORMER (1935)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Victor McLaglen plays one of the great boisterous drunks of all time in John Ford's "The Informer." Not only does Victor play a drunk, he is also an Irish drunk. And he is inebriated throughout this movie, and so much so that it grows tedious. Yep, too tedious to the point of not caring. As I said, he plays a great drunk but he also plays it too well, and the movie's final scenes will make you tear your hair out, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Set in Dublin in the 1920's, an Irish rebel named Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford) is on the run. The Irish drunk and ex-IRA member, Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen), informs on his friend, Frankie, to the British Army. Frankie is located, gunned down, and now Gypo collects a reward, feels a smidgeon of guilt, gives himself away at Frankie's wake to some suspicious IRA members, and spends the rest of the movie drinking, spending most of his reward money and cavorting with other drunks and some prostitutes.

"The Informer" never quite addresses the insights into Gypo's guilt. As directed by John Ford (who has made some clunkers and some terrific pictures), the movie settles for the drunken stupor of Gypo to give us a grand, wicked caricature of a giant Irish drunk who can still punch with great velocity (in one scene, he knocks out a policeman). Gypo is guilty of being an informant and he knows it, yet he points to an innocent tailor (Donald Meek, in the most restrained performance in the movie) as the informant. Once the tailor is cleared, the ensnaring of Gypo becomes tighter but the movie never establishes enough tension to make it palatable. Frankly, I was hoping Gypo was going to be found guilty sooner than the story allows. Since we never get caught up in his misfortune and sense of guilt, it is hard to feel any remorse.

Victor plays it to the hilt, one-hundred percent (he won the Oscar for Best Actor), but there is not enough to draw empathy from his occasionally one-note performance. It is a shame and the ending, involving Una O'Connor (one of the great character actresses of her time) as Frankie's mother, feels tacked-on and inconsistent. "The Informer" lacks drive and passion yet it boasts some spectacular black-and-white photography by Joseph August, who purposely echoes German Expressionism in its foggy look (Max Steiner's haunting music score is also a plus and evokes dread). A minor failure by John Ford is more worthwile than most other films that do less, but I do not think Ford's heart was in the world of film noir or this half-hearted tale of snitching.