Reviewing Movies

As the film starts sixteen-year-old Brendan Behan arrives in Liverpool with two sticks of IRA dynamite strapped to his inner thighs giving a whole new meaning to the expression, ballsy move. An Irish lad with an alarm clock being a red flag at customs he is promptly picked up and eventually sent to reform school. Then as now underage lads are sent on such missions because they will attract lighter sentences. Behan maintains throughout that he is a POW--prisoner of war. At Borstal Behan meets true hardened criminals--rapists, thieves, juvenile delinquents but has the good fortune to arrive during the tenure of a truly enlightened chief warden and to meet his daughter an artist forced home from Paris by WW#2. He manages to convince his bunk mate Charlie that he is not gay but willing to make a friend.

The movie features a mixture of heavy dialects--Behan's Irish brogue, Scottish, Yiddish, Cockney--that can be difficult to follow at times without subtitles. There are assaults and two lads are blown up on the beach by a land mine. But for the most part the film is filled with good-natured banter and the high spirits of young men couped up against their wills. The warders are not mean spirited. Highly recommended.