Making a show of us – Frank McNally on a 1927 film that outraged Irish America

Among the works now screening at the Irish Film Institute is a thing called “The Callahans and the Murphys”.

You don’t have to visit the cinema to see it – it’s on the website, free. And that’s just as well, because all they have is a restored, five-minute fragment of the original: a silent, black-and-white movie from 1927.

For decades since, The Callahans and the Murphys was believed completely lost – and not by accident. MGM Studios were presumed to have destroyed it after failing to placate the Catholic Church and Irish groups outraged by its alleged ethnic slurs.

The surviving scene features some of what annoyed them.

Canadian rhapsody – Frank McNally on a party to celebrate Canada Day

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Making a show of us – Frank McNally on a 1927 film that outraged Irish America

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The death of poets – Tony Delaney on James Clarence Mangan, John Keegan and the cholera epidemic of 1849

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Great but unwashed – Frank McNally on the joys of a dry spell in Dublin

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At a St Patrick’s Day picnic, the eponymous warring families from “Goat Alley”, a New York tenement block, also find themselves neighbours in the park.

Someone produces a keg of “near ale” (the weak beer – half a per cent alcohol by volume – that was all you could legally buy during Prohibition). But the keg contains a potent bootleg brew and inspires a temporary truce.

“This stuff makes me see double and feel single,” jokes Mrs Murphy as she and Mrs Callahan get happily plastered and bond while discussing the inadequacies of men. Then the men start fighting. And when one assures onlookers “Step right up boys! This ain’t private,” everyone else piles in.

Among the original title cards was one describing Goat Alley as a place where “a courteous gentleman always takes off his hat before striking a lady”. That and other insults scandalised Irish Americans, who blamed a Jewish conspiracy and picketed cinemas.

The controversy does not seem to have featured in this or other national newspapers here. But the Kerry Reporter was outraged.

Its man in New York wrote that “vigilance committees” had been established to protest against a movie “in which Irish women are portrayed as drunken and degraded and Irishmen as illiterate buffoons”.

He continued: “The producers of these films are of the Jewish persuasion and they care not in their mad desire for the all-mighty dollar whose feelings they hurt or whether a nation which has ever been more tolerant to the Hebrew is held up to ridicule or contempt.”

MGM pleaded that the movie had already been edited for Irish sensitivities. They then agreed to drop the picnic scene too. But eventually, they withdrew the whole thing. Until the restored vignette, it had not been screened publicly since.

The notoriety is ironic, because the film was based on a collection of stories by Kathleen Thompson Norris (1880-1966), a prolific and best-selling author of the period.

And not only was Norris a proud Irish-American, she was also noted for the moralising tendency in her work, as well as being a real-life prohibitionist.

Born in San Francisco, she lived for a time in the heavily-Irish Mission district, before the family moved north to Mill Valley, to escape the city’s rowdy ways.

San Francisco was a “drinking town”, her father complained. The temperance societies he and his wife supported were unpopular there, interfering as they did with business.

Mill Valley was a complete contrast. A mountain retreat from the city’s infamous fogs, it was a haven of redwood trees and teetotalers. In the temperance sense, it had been “bone dry” for years.

When her parents died, however, Norris moved back to the city and, as eldest child, inherited the burden of the large family. For a while she worked as an accountant. Then she did a creative writing course at Berkeley University and never looked back.

She went on to publish more than 90 books and was also for many years a syndicated newspaper columnist. According to her biographer, Deanna Paoli Gumina, a tendency to write about Irish Catholic life unnerved publishers, who “preferred stories aimed at a white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon audience”.

But she was enormously successful, to an extent that made her feel guilty. Her work came easily, she said, so it seemed unfair it should be so lucrative, “while the greater gift of certain other writers finds so uncertain a market.”

Many of her books were made into screenplays, as with The Callahans and the Murphys. And although she usually had oversight, the IFI’s restored fragment suggests some taking of liberties with her original.

That can still be read online (thanks to San Francisco’s Internet Archive). But on another website, it has been fairly described by a Swedish reader for whom it was a childhood favourite, as “a very sweet collection of short stories about two ordinary Irish families in the US . . . Very down to earth, very predictable, full of traditional old time religion and colour”.

Still, as Gumina suggests, it has a comedy not always present in the author’s work. One of Norris’s self-identified strengths was writing about the second generation Irish in America: their “standards, ideals, attack on the English language, and curious use of gross overstatement or of mild understatement...”

She produced plenty of non-Irish books too. But as Gumina suggests: “Perhaps the Irish-American stories best exemplify the warmth of Kathleen’s humor, which was subdued in many of her works, for she sparkled when she wrote of the lives of Irish-American women.”