Together Again

When A Time to Kill first came out, Matthew McConaughey was on every major magazine cover in the US, being touted as the upcoming star of the late nineties. Despite following up Joel Schumacher´s John Grisham adaptation with a string of high-profile roles - including the lead in Ron Howard´s underperforming Edtv (featured on our cover in March last year) - McConaughey is still not quite a major name.

Yes, I know I´ve said this before. But there´s an irony here. Playing the supporting role of the McConaughey character´s wife in A Time to Kill was another young southern actress, Ashley Judd, who has since cracked the stardom thing with her energetic and affecting performance in Double Jeopardy. Now, four years on, the pair of them are again to play a couple in Paramount´s Dexterity, a romantic drama set in an industrial town in upstate New York.

It´s not the kind of movie Hollywood is supposed to be making these days: McConaughey and Judd´s characters lose their jobs when the local factory closes and have to rebuild their lives, both individually and together. There are no aliens, car chases or dramatic court-room confrontations so, probably as a result, Dexterity is reported to have a ‘modest´ budget. No director has yet been named and a start-date has still to be set for the film, which will be co-financed by Mutual Film Co.

Behan There

To the rest of the world, Brendan Behan is probably best remembered as a kind of literary Oliver Reed, whose drinking exploits attracted more attention than the profession that had made him famous in the first place. But to anyone Irish, Behan is still remembered as an astonishingly gifted writer, all the more surprising given his relatively modest background (I say ‘relatively´ because it was not quite as modest as Behan himself sometimes liked to pretend).

Occupying prime position in the Behan cannon is a passage in which he describes coming home to Ireland after a spell in detention in the UK, and catching his first glimpse of the hills and mountains along the Irish coast from the Holyhead-Dun Laoghaire ferry as the dawn rose behind him. “There they were,” he wrote, “as if I´d never left them; in their sweet and stately order round the Bay - Bray Head, the Sugarloaf, the Two Rock, the Three Rock, Kippure, the king of them all, rising his threatening head behind and over their shoulders till they sloped down to the city...”

It´s a passage which strikes a definite chord among Irish readers - think the Statue of Liberty with ‘America the Beautiful´ playing on the soundtrack - and I make no excuse for including it here, since it is on the last page of Borstal Boy, which is currently being filmed by director Peter Sheridan, with his brother Jim producing alongside Hell´s Kitchen partner, Arthur Mappin (whose infant son, you may recall from a few issues ago, played the youngest of Anjelica Huston´s brood in Agnes Browne, which was still called The Mammy when we featured it in Preview).

Borstal Boy describes Behan´s teenage years, when he was sent to Borstal - a generic term for a British young offenders´ institution - after being caught with explosives he was carrying for the IRA. The book has already been turned into a play, and it is not surprising that Sheridan - whose plans to make a film about Hitler´s beginnings we mentioned here in December 1998 - should be involved in the filming of it.

Slightly more surprising is the actor lined up to play the young Behan: Shawn Hatosy, last seen in Outside Providence. Even more intriguing is the possibility that Borstal Boy will be just the first of two films about Behan´s life, with Sean Penn - who could be made to look like the adult Behan without too much make-up - said to be interested in starring in the second.