HE WAS Belfast’s first bohemian,” is how some film historians choose to describe Brian Desmond Hurst, who is perhaps still the least acknowledged successful Irish film-maker of the last century.
Now an event at the National Film Theatre should help raise Hurst’s popular profile. This evening there’s a special screening of Hurst’s period drama Ourselves Alone (1936), his reading of events surrounding the War for Independence in 1921 and its consequent sense of emotional conflict.
Though Hurst’s movie gives the violence something of a Hollywood melodramatic tone, it’s no less stylised than later portrayals like Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) and Ken Loach’s Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). The film was originally blocked by censors in Dublin and Belfast.
The NFT screening is introduced by Irish film historian Lance Pettit, along with Allan Esler Smith (Hurst’s nephew). Together Pettit and Smith edited Hurst’s memoir Travelling the Road and it’s arguably due to their efforts that Hurst’s name has been retrieved from the dustbin of history. Pettit’s view is that Hurst is a “remarkable figure and poorly under researched”.
Certainly Hurst has some historical pedigree. Born in Castlereagh in 1895, he came from a traditional shipbuilding family. He fought at Gallipoli but after the war studied art in Toronto and found his way to Hollywood. There he worked with pioneers like Rex Ingram and John Ford, learning and honing the film-maker’s craft.
His finest cinematic achievement was in directing Scrooge (1951), the definitive screen version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, aesthetically capturing its ghostly, gothic grotesquerie in Alastair Sim’s wonderfully lugubrious mug.
A working-class Protestant, Hurst eschewed sectarianism, once telling Punch magazine that Catholic-Protestant differences disappeared in the trenches. He would say that an Englishman is worth 20 of any other man and an Irishman worth 50 Englishmen — tongue firmly in cheek.
Lance Pettit hopes for future DVD releases of Hurst’s more obscure works. Meanwhile, the NFT screening of Ourselves Alone offers an intriguing look at a visionary Irish director.
Ourselves Alone screens at the NFT today, October 2
