A young woman, Tara Maguire scandalizes her provincial Irish village in the 1950s by having a baby out of wedlock, and refusing to name the father. She has a rare beauty and every man in town desires her, especially Sergeant Hegarty (Albert Finney).
Mr. Finney, looking puffy and ravaged in the role of a man who has lost much of himself to drink (and whose obsessive interest in Tara somehow offers him the chance of redemption), brings a furious, buried intensity to Hegarty's longing.
EmanuelLevy.Com
June 21, 2007
The film is set in 1957, before TV and cars became popular, thus explaining the centrality of two institutions in the Irish village: the church and the theater.
This familiar pattern of headstrong girl and passions brimming beneath the surface is well directed by first time Scottish helmer Gillies MacKinnon, though the pace slows in middle reels as plot gives way to the troupe's enjoyable stage performances.
