1 - ‘Quiet Men’: Film and Filmmaking in Returned Yank Fictions of the Troubles

Summary

But they did not speak at all of the Black-and-Tan war. That was too near them. That made men frown and women shiver.

Maurice Walsh, Green Rushes (1935)

– I met a few of those quiet men, she said. – At home. Some of Daddy's friends. Never a word out of them about the things they did and saw.

Roddy Doyle, The Dead Republic (2010)

In Patriots (dir. Frank Kerr, 1994), Alexis ‘Alex’ Shannon (Linda Amendola) is a third-generation Irish American who grew up imbibing tales of her heroic Irish grandfather who fought against the Black and Tans. In 1993, she is recruited to the IRA by a charismatic Irishman named Sean McGinnis (Mark Newell) whom she meets in a bar in South Boston, and the pair travels to Ireland together. Sean is a mercenary who works for both the British Army and the IRA; because the IRA is aware that there is an informant in its midst, Sean and the British Army enlist Alex to divert suspicion from Sean and Alex becomes an unsuspecting pawn in a cat-and-mouse game between the British Army and the IRA. As anticipated, the IRA assumes that Alex is the informant and plans to send her on a suicide mission to the headquarters of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), in which she will blow up the loyalist paramilitaries and kill herself in the process. Deposited at UFF headquarters by the IRA, she is commissioned with posing as an American journalist and is given a camcorder and tripod as props. Unbeknownst to Alex, as soon as she switches the camera on, a bomb, contained within the camcorder, will be detonated. Realising what the IRA's plan is, Sean warns her to flee the scene and arranges for the British Army to pick her up and transport her back to the U.S. and to safety. However, the Army does not uphold its end of the bargain: keeping Alex alive is potentially too costly for them and they face a public relations disaster if the truth comes out. Drugged and abandoned in an alleyway on the border between East and West Belfast, Alex is pursued by both loyalist and republican paramilitaries before she finally escapes back to Boston.