The feckless in movies usually have charm to see them through. The titular Ginger (Robert Shaw) is remarkably deficient on that front. He’s the wishful-thinker par excellence though his wishes are off the scale and he seems to be also deficient on the thinking front. After 14 years in the Army in Ireland, he’s emigrated with wife Vera (Mary Ure) and daughter Paulie (Libby McLintock) to Canada where he has notably failed the make the grade.
He’s eminently employable, just not at the type of job to which he thinks he is entitled, if not directly in the managerial line then something where promotion is guaranteed. He’s always got an excuse for quitting a job after a few weeks.
This would fall into the “kitchen sink drama” sub-genre except that Ginger is not exactly on the breadline and if poverty threatens it’s through his own self-destructive and selfish tendencies. His wife has given up so Ginger has to lie to her about having already bought the boat tickets home.
He’s so unsympathetic, self-deluded and dishonest that you are virtually shouting hurrah for Vera when she takes up with another man, Joe (Tom Harvey), a journalist and ostensibly Ginger’s best friend. That shocks him out of his malaise, and he takes up a job delivering diapers. Even getting in at the bottom of the newspaper business, working as a proofreader, isn’t enough for his inflated ambition. But he’s been kicked out his apartment, sleeping now at the YMCA. Further humiliations ensue, sufficient for him to accept his shortcomings and try to change.
While he’s confident in his own potential, nobody else is and the movie basically trudges along with him until he comes to his senses. This isn’t an emigrant’s tale in the normal cinematic sense because he’s not ostracized because of his nationality, not barred from jobs, in fact there’s a whole system set up by the Government to help him find a job.
It takes his wife quite a while to cotton on to his constant deception
Quite why such a downbeat picture ever got made is a mystery. The novel by Brian Moore, on which it was based was certainly a literary and commercial success, and it was funded by Frank Crawley, possibly the biggest of the Canadian independents, on a $500,000 budget. It ended up on arthouse release in the UK.
Richard Harris was originally nailed-on for the part but he swapped it for Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965). Harris would have brought more immediate physical energy and a sense of danger to the role, rather than the sense of an oaf just bumbling along.
Possibly the best thing about it is the realism. Yes, it’s really the star crossing icy roads, just avoiding oncoming traffic in scenes that were clearly set on Montreal roads and not on the safety of a sound stage.
Shaw and Ure were married, so were both tagged as rising stars, the husband coming off From Russia with Love (1963), but there was argument to put that she was already the bigger marquee name after Look Back in Anger (1959), Sons and Lovers (1960) and female lead in The Mind Benders (1963).
This really had not much going for it other than worthiness, the chance for a decent film with some reasonable names to come out of Canada, and to give another rising star, director Irvin Kershner (A Fine Madness, 1966), a chance. Written by Moore (Torn Curtain, 1966).
Well-made but too dour for me.
Amazon Prime has it. In fact, it was recommended to me on that channel because I had watched Two Gentlemen Sharing.
