The Quare Fellow

Brendan Behan, the quixotic, eternally sloshed Irish poet/playwright, peppered his play +The Quare Fellow with plenty of "gallows humor." The film version dispenses with most the play's morbid jests, leaving us with a grim, straightforward account of a Dublin death-row prison guard (Patrick ...more

Although it takes far too many liberties with the wrenching Brendan Behan play upon which it is based, The Quare Fellow nevertheless emerges as an effective and affecting social problem movie, one which successfully and potently mixes the personal and the political. The film loses the sardonic humor and narrows the original ensemble focus to the story of a young warder and his gradual understanding of the horrors of capital punishment. The message is still Behan, but the method has been changed ...more