Film Fleadh just makes me movie-mad!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Summertime in Galway City slips up a gear or three next week with the arrival of the 31st   Galway Film Fleadh. Running from Tuesday to Sunday, the festival is packed with premieres, historical treasures and masterclasses.

I’m fired up – so in honour of film, and just because I can, I’m going to hit you with some personal favourites.

This list is being created as I write.

Later I’ll wail about the movies I forgot.

Let’s start in 1954 with Elia Kazan’s ‘On the Waterfront.’ Forget petulant Johnny in ‘The Wild One’ and his mumbling mafiosi parody in ‘The Godfather’: dockworker Terry Malloy is Marlon Brando’s finest role.

Stunningly lit by cinematographer Boris Kaufman and given wings by Leonard Bernstein’s score, Brando’s hero is accompanied by a phenomenal cast including Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger.

From brutal dockyard we leap into a green and rarely pleasant land, with Ang Lee’s ‘Sense and Sensibility.’

Emma Thomson spent years lovingly adapting Jane Austen’s novel into a superb Oscar-winning screenplay. Within the film, as Elinor Dashwood, Thompson produces a moment of acting that takes my breath away every time.

Watch it and you’ll know, as well as seeing Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet play parts they were born to.

I defy you not to fall in love with Rickman’s Colonel Brandon.

From the gently insane manners of old England we move to the brutality of the asylum.

To read Charlie’s column in fulll, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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