Uniform approval for The Guard

Date Published: 07-Jul-2011

BY JUDY MURPHY

The Garda car parked outside the door of the Eye Cinema was entirely appropriate for the Irish premiere of the most eagerly awaited film of the Galway Film Fleadh.

It was also appropriate that John Michael McDonagh’s debut feature, The Guard got its first Irish screening in the Eye, with the aftershow party in the G Hotel.

The Guard, set in Galway, stars Brendan Gleeson as a West of Ireland sergeant whose anarchic outlook and unusual attitude to drugs and prostitutes shocks a straitlaced FBI agent (Don Cheadle), who is in Ireland to investigate a drug smuggling gang.

Several scenes from the film were shot in the G Hotel where on Wednesday night, a red carpet snaked all the way from the venue’s main entrance right through to the Eye. It mightn’t have had the plush pile of the one employed by the State for the visit of the Queen and Barack Obama, but it sufficed beautifully.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.