Cecil Parker in my humble opinion got his career characterization with the title role in Captain Boycott. This man made a career of playing oafish characters and in this film he plays an oaf who enters our language.
The key to understanding the character of Captain Boycott is that he doesn't think of himself as evil. He's merely defending the established social order in Ireland as it has come down for generations. The fact that he's on top of the order is merely the good judgment of the Deity who put him there. The problem with these tenant farmers whom he evicts for lack of rent payment is that they need a little military discipline, the kind Parker had in the British army.
We also have to remember that this is not the factual story of Captain Boycott, though the film does come close to the actual story. It's a romance with Boycott in the background between tenant farmer Stewart Granger and Kathleen Ryan who has come with her family to live in County Mayo and take over one of the farms that Parker has evicted the original owners from. The film is based on the historical novel Captain Boycott by Philip Rooney.
To put it in language that Americans can understand what Ryan and her father Niall McGinniss are, are scabs. The Irish Land League that Charles Stewart Parnell organized was essentially a union of tenant farmers. Before the Land League, an owner or agent like Boycott when they evicted a tenant family, they merely moved in another until that one couldn't pay the rent. The social position of these scab farmers was at best a tenuous one.
What Robert Donat in his brief appearance in the film as Parnell proposes is that the shunning be made formal. So Boycott as he puts it has to go twelve miles to find a barber willing to cut his hair. Shunned too are McGinniss and Ryan and their family until the film is over and Granger and Ryan can come together without politics interfering.
One weakness of the film is the fact that the religious differences are not even mentioned and that's critical. It's rather well known that Parnell was a Protestant and viewed as a traitor to his class for that as well as being a landowner himself. The harvesters that Boycott imports to break the Land League are from Ulster and also Protestants.
Religion is not left completely out. Winking and nodding at the activities of the Land League is Alastair Sim as the village priest. In fact the Catholic Church turned out for the whole of the 19th century to be a bulwark of the British occupation. Sim's an exceptional and wise priest, but it was only in the following century that the church turned from being against rebellion to a neutral stance.
Robert Donat is a wonderful Parnell, far better with his aesthetic personality than Clark Gable was in MGM's disastrous biographical film. It was a part Donat was born to play and I only wish he'd done a full length biographical film of Parnell during his career.
So by the shunning of Captain Boycott by nearly all in County Mayo his name entered the English language as a term for avoiding as a public policy. And the film Captain Boycott is a fine retelling of that tale.
The key to understanding the character of Captain Boycott is that he doesn't think of himself as evil. He's merely defending the established social order in Ireland as it has come down for generations. The fact that he's on top of the order is merely the good judgment of the Deity who put him there. The problem with these tenant farmers whom he evicts for lack of rent payment is that they need a little military discipline, the kind Parker had in the British army.
We also have to remember that this is not the factual story of Captain Boycott, though the film does come close to the actual story. It's a romance with Boycott in the background between tenant farmer Stewart Granger and Kathleen Ryan who has come with her family to live in County Mayo and take over one of the farms that Parker has evicted the original owners from. The film is based on the historical novel Captain Boycott by Philip Rooney.
To put it in language that Americans can understand what Ryan and her father Niall McGinniss are, are scabs. The Irish Land League that Charles Stewart Parnell organized was essentially a union of tenant farmers. Before the Land League, an owner or agent like Boycott when they evicted a tenant family, they merely moved in another until that one couldn't pay the rent. The social position of these scab farmers was at best a tenuous one.
What Robert Donat in his brief appearance in the film as Parnell proposes is that the shunning be made formal. So Boycott as he puts it has to go twelve miles to find a barber willing to cut his hair. Shunned too are McGinniss and Ryan and their family until the film is over and Granger and Ryan can come together without politics interfering.
One weakness of the film is the fact that the religious differences are not even mentioned and that's critical. It's rather well known that Parnell was a Protestant and viewed as a traitor to his class for that as well as being a landowner himself. The harvesters that Boycott imports to break the Land League are from Ulster and also Protestants.
Religion is not left completely out. Winking and nodding at the activities of the Land League is Alastair Sim as the village priest. In fact the Catholic Church turned out for the whole of the 19th century to be a bulwark of the British occupation. Sim's an exceptional and wise priest, but it was only in the following century that the church turned from being against rebellion to a neutral stance.
Robert Donat is a wonderful Parnell, far better with his aesthetic personality than Clark Gable was in MGM's disastrous biographical film. It was a part Donat was born to play and I only wish he'd done a full length biographical film of Parnell during his career.
So by the shunning of Captain Boycott by nearly all in County Mayo his name entered the English language as a term for avoiding as a public policy. And the film Captain Boycott is a fine retelling of that tale.