Ireland – The Magnificent 60s

Hidden Assets: Season 1, 2021* Season 2, 2023 Season 3, 2025

Jumping the shark takes a particular blend of over-reach and narrative naivety. Assumptions about what makes a series tick are often misleading. Dramatic changes to personnel and location can both add (as in Season 2) and detract (as in Season 3).

I’ve been binge-watching this Irish-Belgium/Irish-Spanish crime series when I should be knuckling down to viewing more movies from the 1960s. I thought I was onto a winner when the second series proved a vast improvement on the first. That was before I came to the third series. The first two series are connected and I’m just hoping nobody’s of a mind to link the third series to another, as yet unmade, series.

As far as investigation goes, we’re in new territory. The Criminal Assets Bureau in Ireland tracks down the cash made by big-time crooks. Jurisdiction can extend, by mutual consent, to European countries such as Belgium (the first two seasons) or Spain (the third).

What makes the first two, related, series so captivating is that they’re not just about crime but political machination and big business and cover areas like immigration and the rise of the Far Right political parties.

SERIES ONE:

You might wonder how Irish cops end up in Antwerp. The connection is diamonds, Antwerp being famous for them, and gangsters now utilizing them as the easiest way to shift currency away from prying eyes. Irish cop Emer Berry (Angeline Ball) heads up a Criminal Assets Bureau investigation chasing gangster Fionn Brannigan (Peter Coonan).

That leads her to Belgium where she crosses swords and paths with gum-chewing (he’s trying to stop smoking) Belgian cop Christian de Jong (Wouter Hendrickx). He’s on the trail of terrorists whose latest outrage killed 11 people and sent the ratings soaring for Far-Right politician Victor Maes (Steve Geerts). Brannigan turns out to be the estranged brother of Bibi Melnick (Simone Kirby) who runs a huge business in the port of Antwerp.

She’s connected by marriage to dodgy businessman Richard Melnick (Michael Ironside) who wants to privatize the publicly-run port. Bibi gets mixed up in a people-trafficking scam, linked to the terrorist. Takes a heck of a time to entangle most of the proceedings and there’s an ending – a possible connection between the terrorism act and Maes – that lends itself to a sequel.

Bibi is the main victim, losing her job to the ruthless Frances Swann (Karine Vanasse). The hard yards of policing and inspired use of technology are compounded by sufficient action. But the biggest flaw is Angelina Ball. She just looks disinterested all the way through and given she’s our conduit to the developing tale it’s hard at times to summon up the energy to keep watching.

SERIES TWO:

Ramps up the tempo beginning with Emer Berry having been replaced by high-flying Detective Sergeant Claire Wallace (Nora-Jane Noone) who has the grit, tenacity and emotional input her predecessor lacked. And a huge gender shift of power takes place.

It’s the women who take prime position. Frances Swann looks like a distant relative of Jack Palance or Lee Marvin with those gimlet eyes and she spins the wheel astutely. Bibi Melnick, who looks out for the count, standing to lose her entire family fortune and possibly her son (husband James already collateral damage), pulls out an absolute blinder of a last-minute trick and reveals that she’s a worthy successor in the duping game to the likes of Keyser Soze of The Usual Suspects fame. Even Fionn’s wife Siobhan (Sophie Jo Wasson) isn’t an innocent bystander but well up to ensuring she gets her share of ill-gotten gains.

There’s a disconnect between Wallace and De Jong because she suspects there’s a mole in his side of the operation and that person, in the spirit of entrepreneurism that infects the city, is a woman and delivers, if unintentionally, the coup that knocks the audience for six. And in the background, cleverly playing the conservation card, is another businesswoman who turns out to be in collusion with Bibi. Wallace and De Jong also fall out because he shoots the cornered terrorist and she wanted him alive, not out of the goodness of her heart, but for interrogation purposes.

But this is well-drilled stuff, red herrings, twist and turns, interference by superiors, realpolitik, the harsh stink of dirty dealings plus a side helping of racism and drug running. The stakes are incredibly high, politicians blackmailed by criminals, assassins running amok, cops racing against the clock to prevent another terrorist explosion, billions of Euros on tap from privatization and another 200 million Euros – Bibi’s father’s hidden wealth – up for grabs. The cops think they have come out on top, outside of the political machinery that they have to put up with, and the audience thinks so too until the final killer scene.

Without the deadweight of Angeline Ball, the second series really flies, all the actors stepping up to the plate, Nora-Jane Noone (Bring Them Down, 2024) and Wouter Hendrickx (The Class of 2000, 2025) more than hold this together and would be the stars of the show except for sheer cunning they are outdone by Simone Kirby (Kneecap, TV series 2024), who plays an especially clever long game in acting terms, and Karine Vanasse (Cardinal, TV series 2017-2020). Shining among the supporting cast is Cathy Belton (Miss Scarlett and the Duke, TV series 2020-2026).

SERIES THREE:

Begins with a major problem. De Jong was killed in series two so he’s not available and the action switches to Spain. But Detective Wallace (Nora-Jane Noone) is now saddled with two sub-plots. Suddenly, it’s revealed she is a mother with a disgruntled partner. And although she stood calmly by and watched a terrorist get his head blown off in series two – her only emotion being annoyance that she can’t interrogate him – now she appears to fall apart when a criminal blows his brains out in front of her.

The plot, when it veers from the straightforward drug-running and people-trafficking, is shot through with holes. Wallace, hunting 27 million Euros, heads for Bilbao where the trail leads to Irish crook-gone-legit Anthony Pearse (Frank Laverty) and she becomes embroiled in a local investigation into the murder of a local journalist.

I’m sure all the plots regarding drug-smuggling and people-trafficking have been explored and I sympathize with writers forced to come up with something novel. But not when it’s as barmy as this. Immigrants and drugs are being smuggled in from Africa in the same trucks carrying hazardous waste (the immigrants a side hustle).

Immigrants had been turning up in hospital with the kind of ailments you get from contamination with hazardous waste. But none of the gangsters unloading either immigrants or drugs have been so afflicted, yet the minute Wallace inadvertently steps in a puddle of waste alarm bells start ringing.

The waste is being transported out of Africa for treatment in Bilbao by – wait for it – a medical charity that wants to ensure the waste resulting from its good deeds isn’t left behind. There must be countless dumps, legal or otherwise, in Africa for the stuff, never mind shipping it thousands of miles, at who knows what cost to a struggling charity, to northern Spain (presumably there’s no comparable factory in southern Spain.)

Nora Jane-Noone is hampered by having to switch on the emotions every now and then whereas before she had been as flinty-eyed as the criminals and having to keep a straight face at various denouements involving hazardous waste. The screen chemistry (not of the romantic kind I hasten to add) that she had with De Jong in the previous two series is not replicated with the Spanish cop played by Inigo Gastesi.

The only saving grace in the third series is a new character, the extremely annoying ambitious Detective Liam Boylan (Donall O’ Healai) who rats on colleagues, steals everyone’s ideas but actually is an ace interrogator and has the knack of getting information out of people where others have failed.

Series three is a series too far but the previous episodes are worth watching.

The Fighting Prince of Donegal (1966) ***

I’m amazed I sat through this without complaint as a kid. This was a rare outing for me, given I grew up in a town without a cinema and the only time I went was for a roadshow musical at Xmas or if we were away on holiday for the summer in towns that were bursting with picture houses. No doubt my parents, of Irish descent, were seduced by the last word of the title while assuming that the second word would be enough to keep us kids happy.

Unfortunately, the title is something of a misnomer. The titular character Hugh O’Donnell (Peter McEnery) spends more time sitting on his backside in a prison than he does engaging in any form of fighting. And in another annoying dupe, swords are scarcely in evidence, the weapon of choice being a wooden club of sorts, so it hardly qualifies as the swashbuckler the poster suggests.

Where Walt Disney was happy to play fast and loose with other aspects of history in other movies, here he cleaves close to the truth – though Hugh didn’t marry a McSweeney and his father didn’t die – so what we get is some kind of rebellion story, as the Irish attempt to rise up against the occupying English in the 1580s. If you are aware of your history, you will know that Oliver Cromwell is to blame for the English re-conquest of Ireland. Various rebellions followed, of which this is one.

It starts off promisingly enough with a nice bit of myth, that when Hugh becomes chief of the Clan O’Donnell he triggers a prophecy that insists the Irish will become free. That’s easier said than done due to the lack of a cohesive rebellion force thanks to infighting and historical distrust between the clans. And when Hugh does attempt to stand up against the British he’s promptly imprisoned – again and again.

A better title would be The Escapologist of Donegal because that’s mostly, except for the beginning and final sections, what this is about. He escapes, is betrayed and recaptured, or escapes, racing through the streets of Dublin, and remains free and then manages to gather the clans under his banner and take on the English.

And, actually, Hugh is not that keen on the use of force to win freedom. He prefers negotiation. So you can imagine how exciting that is for the kids in the audience. He wants to unite all the clans and hope the English will see sense. Luckily, for the frustrated kids in the audience, the English are not inclined to sit around a negotiating table. So, at last, we get a battle.

To save it from just being a history lesson, a romance is sneaked in between Hugh and Kathleen McSweeney (Susan Hampshire), daughter of another clan chief, and who already has an ardent admirer. A wedding is the easiest way to create unity between clans, but, luckily, this isn’t just the political matchmaking that occurred in England and Europe.

But that nascent romance is put on the back burner for most of the picture while Hugh sits in jail or runs around the country in escape mode.

So, a few fights with cudgels and fisticuffs, some bonding with other prisoners, some wooing of the clans until at last at last there is the semblance of a battle.

Nearly 60 years on from first viewing I am not won over. The politics and maneuvering is certainly more interesting to an adult, but I am still miffed at the absence of much actual swordplay – and you know how fond I am of a swashbuckler. It’s just too earnest in setting up a rebellion tale and the escapes have none of the ingenuity we have come to expect from such.

Peter McEnery (The Moon-Spinners, 1964) looks distinctly uncomfortable as a matinee idol of the kind groomed by Disney, especially when you see what he was capable of a few years later in the more scandalous Negatives (1968). Susan Hampshire (The Trygon Factor, 1966) only tops and tails the picture and her entire Disney experience was clearly so miserable she excised it from her biography.

Directed by Michael O’Herlihy (Smith!, 1969) from a screenplay by debutant Robert T. Reilley based on the Robert Westerby novel.

I Thank a Fool (1962) ***

One of those bonkers pictures whose nuttiness is initially irritating but ends up being thoroughly enjoyable once you give in to the barmy plot and overheated melodrama. Murder, suicide, madness, illicit sex, blackmail – and that’s just the start of this farrago of nonsense. And set in Liverpool before The Beatles made it famous.

Christine (Susan Hayward), a doctor, is jailed when she kills her married seriously ill lover in a mercy killing. She’s not convicted of the murder but of the lesser crime of medical malpractice, but after serving an 18-month sentence finds she is unemployable, even in more lowly professions where her prison stretch counts against her.

When she is hired by the attorney Stephen (Peter Finch) who prosecuted her to look after his mentally ill wife Liane (Diane Cilento), the audience will already smell a rat given that Christine has changed her name and therefore the lawyer must have made considerable effort to track her down. His argument is that since she is no longer a qualified practitioner, she cannot advocate to have his wife committed to a mental institute, as a proper doctor would be required to, since Liane is clearly a danger to herself and other people. Your immediate suspicion is that Christine has been hired to take the rap once Liane is bumped off.

And it doesn’t take long for Christine to work out that not everything adds up. Liane is given enough rope to hang herself, access to a car to cause an accident, access to a horse which could easily bolt or fall.

Liane has been told her Irish father died in an accident where she was driving, the incident that triggered her madness. But when we discover the father, Captain Ferris (Cyril Cusack), is very much alive that’s the cue for a slew of unlikely events. When Liane finds her father, he’s not in the least a candidate for canonization, but an alcoholic. That triggers further mental trauma. And another accident, self-inflicted. After Christine administers pills, the young woman is found dead.

*Bit of a stretch to compare it to the movies*
*mentioned in this poster.*

Naturally, an inquest brings up Christine’s past and suspicion falls on her. And that would be par for the course, and it would be up to the condemned woman to find a way to prove her innocence. But that takes us into even murkier depths.

There’s bad blood between Capt Ferris and Stephen and the inference that this was only resolved by the father offering his underage daughter to the lawyer to be followed by the unscrupulous father blackmailing Stephen. Then it turns out there’s no case to answer and that Christine is innocent because, blow me down, Liane committed suicide.

But what should have been a straightforward, if unlikely, murder plot comes unstuck because it can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. Too many ingredients are thrown into the pot and the result is a mess.

Even the queen of melodrama Susan Hayward (Stolen Hours, 1963) can’t rescue this. And the pairing with Peter Finch (Accident, 1966) doesn’t produce the necessary sparks. Despite a variable Irish accent, Diane Cilento (Hombre, 1967) comes off best as the wayward deluded young woman.

Robert Stevens (In the Cool of the Day, 1963) directs from a screenplay by Oscar-nominated Karl Tunberg (The 7^th Dawn, 1964) adapting the bestseller by Audrey Erskine-Lindop.

Had every opportunity to be a star attraction in the So Bad It’s Good sub-genre but fails miserably. Still, if you enter into the swing of things, remarkably tolerable.

Young Cassidy (1965) ***

I’m assuming MGM adjudged that a film about a playwright, no matter how famous, and even if directed by John Ford (Cheyenne Autumn, 1964), would not be enough to attract an audience. And that a better physical match for said writer would have been a weedy actor of a Tom Courtenay disposition. So, I came to this with no idea it was about world-famous Irish playwright Sean O’Casey since his name is never mentioned and the main character is called John Cassidy (Rod Taylor).

Which was just as well because I was wondering what kind of lad Cassidy was when despite his obvious brawn he was an inept labourer, requiring instruction on how to properly use a spade. That this working-class fellow has any inclination towards authorship is not obvious until halfway through the picture, by which time he has demonstrated qualities more appropriate for brawling, revolution and sex.

*Technically, this was a John Ford film as he was the producer.*
*The French chose not to point out he was not the director*.

It probably says a lot about me that I was unaware of the significance of the title of O’Casey’s most famous play – The Plough and the Stars (1926 and, incidentally, filmed a decade later by Ford). By the time I was cogniscent of the country – early on, I assure you, as my grandfather was an Irish immigrant – the Irish flag was the tricolor made up of green, white and orange. I hadn’t known that the flag created by rebels two years before the Easter Uprising of 1916 was a representation of the plough and the stars, hence public outrage when O’Casey blithely adopted it as the title for his breakthrough play.

But you only need a vague idea of history to appreciate the movie. A couple of stunning scenes provide the background of dissent and poverty. The brutality of soldiers and police in quelling a riot is matched by striking transport workers tossing a scab into the river, his drowning ensured by the wagon that follows him in. Cassidy’s true position in the hierarchy is best shown when he is given a cheque rather than cash from a publisher. Lacking a bank account, not only does he fail to cash the cheque but is treated dismissively by clerks at the bank. His joy at rising above his station in receiving such a payment is immediately destroyed by feeling out of place and unwelcome in a bank.

Because, otherwise, Cassidy is quite the confident young fellow, winning over almost any young woman who falls within his compass, varying from upmarket prostitute Daisy (Julie Christie) to meek bookshop assistant Nora (Maggie Smith) and casual acquaintances.

Writing isn’t presented in the romantic manner of David Lean in Doctor Zhivago out the same year (with Julie Christie in a much bigger role), no stunning imagery and no close-up of soulful eyes, just Cassidy sitting at a table working through the night. But there is no indication as to why he chose plays as his metier, especially when the main theatre in Dublin, the Abbey, was the fiefdom of the middle- and upper-classes.

Ironically, Cassidy is tested more when his situation improves than as a downtrodden worker joining the revolutionary cause. As a worker his fists, brawn, brain and looks see him through. But once he steps up into the intellectual class, he is adrift, his new occupation driving a wedge through relationships.

Not aware that this was a biopic of a playwright, I had little need to question the narrative, and just took each incident as it came. I never had the impression of a condensed biopic, crammed full of cameos. More of an interesting story set against the background of rising Irish nationalism.

There’s a certain amount of “Oirishness” to contend with – the accents vary – the poverty is never as bleak as you might expect, and once the story heads out of Dublin you might think it’s going to go all the way to The Quiet Man country. But then you have to bear in mind that working-class poverty, as long there was employment available, was not quite of the slum kind, and that once you get out of Dublin you do indeed hit beautiful countryside.

Rod Taylor is good as the brawler-turned-playwright. In the duel of the rising stars, Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969) wins by a nose from Julie Christie, but then, though further down the credits, she has the bigger role. Michael Redgrave (Assignment K, 1968) as poet W.B. Yeats (responsible for the phrase “a terrible beauty is born”) makes the most of choice lines, Edith Evans (The Chalk Garden, 1964) is a quirky, mischievous Lady Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey. It’s top-heavy with talent including Sian Philips (Becket, 1964), Flora Robson (55 Days at Peking, 1963), Jack MacGowran (Age of Consent, 1969) and T.P. McKenna (Perfect Friday, 1970).

Turns out John Ford was too ill to direct more than few minutes and that role fell to Jack Cardiff (Dark of the Sun, 1968) and I would have to say he does an agreeable job. John Whiting (The Captain’s Table, 1959) drew from O’Casey’s autobiography to write an intelligent script.

Unwelcome (2022) ***- Seen at the Cinema

Cult contender, assuming some basis in Irish legend. Otherwise, Straw Dogs (1971) meets Yoda with a side order of Barbarian (2022) and a touch of Se7en (1995). Someone’s definitely got it in for the Irish this year, but those finger-chopping Banshees have nothing on this little number.

After enduring a home invasion in the city, heavily pregnant Maya (Hannah-John Kamen) and cowardly husband Jamie (Douglas Booth) head for the Irish countryside, having inherited a rundown cottage from his odd aunt. Only thing is, warns neighbor and local publican Maeve (Maimh Cusack). you have to leave out a bit of bloody liver every day beside the back gate to assuage the Redcaps aka little people aka leprechauns aka goblins aka anything else you want to make up.

The story goes said aunt sacrificed her baby to save her dying husband, but it turns out the baby went missing, aged two, and was never found. Frosty reception at the local inn, a la An American Werewolf in London (1981), is a prank but the family of builders headed by a gobby Daddy (Colm Meaney), and his three kids, the gobby one from Derry Girls (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), a thin gobby lad (Chris Walley) – with “the brain of a rocking horse” – and a peeping tom of a giant (Kristian Nairn) are on the malevolent side.

Not content with stealing any spare cash, Jamie’s stash of chocolate biscuits and his beer, and stirring up anti-English sentiment, smoking joints when they should be working and generally acting like workshy cliches, they constantly challenge the milksop Englishman who can thump a punchbag to his heart’s content but finds it hard to raise a finger in anger.

Beyond the gate there’s some kind of magical silent wood and a stone house. And feral creatures, Yoda-shaped, with shark-like teeth who might be able to fly and might have something to do with a nearby castle. A drunk man might have gone missing. Maya might be seeing what isn’t there. It’s that kind of film, mostly suggestive until it suddenly catches fire. Then it’s an onslaught.

And if you can take the Redcaps as being covered in Boy Scout badges and displaying some neat dance moves and a climax that seems relentless with Maya forced to become Final Girl since Jamie is about as helpful as having Jack Whitehall on your team. There’s more rain than in the Seven Samurai, though, to be fair, we were warned it rains 365 days a year in Ireland, Jamie treated as punchbag, the creepy giant trying his hand at rape, the thin one about to make his bones as a murderer, childbirth, the girl full of sexual swagger, decapitated heads in shopping bags, slicing, dicing, shotguns and shillelaghs and, you guessed, it a frying pan, and ending with the barmiest, although to some extent logical, image imaginable.

Like any cult contender, your first reaction might well be to laugh your head off at the preposterous goings-on but strangely enough it does work. While continuing to proclaim his manly abilities, and his sworn duty to defend his wife, Jamie is very much the modern husband, that is to say useless, completely lacking the protection gene, leaving it to the gutsier woman to clean up the mess that his unnecessary bravado creates.

*Had I seen this poster which gives the entire game away I wouldn’t have gone.*

To her credit, Hannah-John Kamen (Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, 2021) goes the whole nine yards, continually playing the supportive wife to a weakling, turning the paranormal to her advantage, not averse to pulling the trigger should the occasion demand. There’s little backstory to hang her character on, apart from a desperation to conceive given a previous abortion. But she has to deal with a continually changing scenario, negotiation with the wayward family, calming the giant, taking narrative center stage.

And it might be better going into it without cinematic preconception. If you’re of the age of the target audience you might have never seen Straw Dogs, therefore the villainous quartet might not appear descendants of the previous film, and, like Barbarian, you might happily accept the importance of babies to the modern horror picture.

A bit too long perhaps, and at times you might not know whether to laugh or applaud, but in the great tradition of The Evil Dead (1981) you might come back for more. Not a horror film in the gore/splatter league, and not that thoughtful either, but still capable of exerting a cinematic spell.

Belfast (2021) ***** – Seen at the Cinema

Except for people trying to kill him, this would be a heart-warming tale of young Buddy (Jude Hill) growing up in a tight-knit community in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. In the vein of John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987) with war – civil war in this case – seen through the eyes of a child, instead we witness how religious differences taken to the extreme tear neighbourhoods apart.

With violence taking up so much of the foreground, there was a danger the lives of the characters would be solely dictated by their reaction to the conflict. But, in fact, a whole world of family comes very much alive, mostly in understated and often subtle fashion, with Buddy very much on the fringes of the adult world. Just as a film about childhood it is simply marvellously evocative, the boy wanting to join a secret gang, stealing from a shop, playing in the street, going to the pictures, agog at old westerns on television, dressing up as someone from Thunderbirds. On top of that you had to somehow accommodate the deranged habits of teachers that you accepted without question, priests that scared you half to death and trying to work out in your head the insoluble problems of a universe nobody can understand anyway.

Buddy is at just at the right age of wide-eyed innocence before teenage problems take their toll and his wee romance with the girl he fancies is as cute as this rough-edged movie gets. Romance is a big thing here. Clear-sighted romance, not the kind that sends characters spinning off into passionate delirium or screaming at their partner non-stop. His mother (Catriona Balfe) is a vividly-drawn character, mother most of the time while her husband (Jamie Dornan) is away working, the kind of mother who is forced to be stoic, with bills mounting up, and yet high on romance when the opportunity arises, the Everlasting Love sequence a stand-out.

The father, except for not paying his taxes, is almost a Gregory Peck of a father, an upright, stand-up type of guy, a fount of wisdom for a son, and yet as a man never backing down. And any grandfather (Ciaran Hinds) that has the savvy to continue a half-century of romance with his wife (Judi Dench) by singing the love song from Camelot will rise in anyone’s estimation. In some senses, this is simply a rite of passage picture, Buddy engaging in first romance, doing some good things and some bad, encountering the death of a loved one.

Some of the scenes of violence are stunning, the tanks rolling through the streets, men patrolling at night with flame-lit torches, the riots. But you are more likely to remember the moments of tenderness and the family coming together whether opening presents at Xmas or thinking they are going to hurtle over the cliff along with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang though you were more likely to be interested in duelling dinosaurs at that age than Raquel Welch at her most “Raquel” (One Million Years B.C).

And all of this gets you asking: Kenneth Branagh, what have you been doing all this time? Almost two decades of throwing away your directorial talent and only Hercule Poirot memorable on the acting side. This is a brilliant autobiographical story with a crisp script with superb performances all round.

But why on earth was it in black-and-white? Directors film in black-and-white due to a) artistic pretension b) shortage of money or c) because they disdain the mass audience. Sticking on a few minutes of touristy Belfast stuff in color at the start in order to satisfy the funders seems bizarre. My hope is that worth of mouth will bring it the audiences it deserves and that people are not put off by the arrogance of a mainstream picture being made in black-and-white.

The Blogger Speaks

This weekend I am one of the very few male speakers at the “Doing Women’s Film and Television History” international conference being hosted by Maynooth University, Dublin, on July 10-11. Naturally it is a virtual conference but it is packed with speakers from all over the world who have been researching issues relating to women working in film and television. I am not an academic so it is signal honor for me to be invited to speak at a university-run conference.

My topic is “When Women Ruled Hollywood” which looks at female salaries in the movie business from 1910 to 1970. Although most people think women were hard-done-by in Hollywood and generally considered as second-class citizens, I found this was not at all the case. In the 1910s, Mary Pickford earned double the earnings of Charlie Chaplin. In the 1920s, the top earning star of either gender was Corinne Griffith.s

At the start of the 1930s, Greta Garbo was the dominant figure when it came to salaries. In 1935 Mae West was the second-highest earner in the whole of America, beaten only by William Randolph Hearst, immortalised as Citizen Kane.

In the annual salary league for the remainder of the 1930s and 1940s, Claudette Colbert (twice), Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford and Deanna Durbin all topped the rankings and in the years when males came out on top the female stars were not far behind.

While female salaries dipped in the 1950s, by the 1960s women were again beating the males at the salary game, Elizabeth Taylor way ahead of everybody, Audrey Hepburn on $1 million a picture, Julie Andrews out-earning Paul Newman in Torn Curtain and newcomer Barbra Streisand reaching unheard-of commercial heights.

I had written a couple of business histories of Hollywood, the research for which took me back to 1910 and in the course of writing those books I discovered information about salaries that would have been out of place in those works, so I dug around some more and came up with the information for this talk.

If you want an idea of my speech, you can check out this short sample on Youtube.