The Informer

The Informer won the Best Director Oscar in 1936, and would be one of four such films directed by John Ford throughout the course of his career. Ford is best remembered now for the iconic westerns he made with John Wayne, though in The Informer he draws on his Irish roots to look at themes of poverty and loyalty in a tense IRA setting. He delivers a tough-minded allegory about convictions, principles and codes of honour.

Victor McLaglen plays Gypo, a simple-minded and brooding everyman figure reduced to desperation after being thrown out of the IRA. His situation drives him to turn informer on a friend-turned-fugitive, an ill-conceived act that sees him rewarded with 20 pounds by the police. Gypo has grand plans of using the money to escape to a new life in America with his prostitute sweetheart, but his shortsightedness and apparent alcoholism instead leads to a single night of drunken excess. Meanwhile, the IRA turn their sights on him and his suspicious behaviour, asking him to help find the informer in return for a renewed membership, and taking note of the loose coins that trail from him like an accusation. Poor Gypo is so excited by the prospect of rejoining the IRA that he seems to forgot that the informer they're looking for is himself.

McLaglen, a character-actor who specialised in playing drunken and bullish Irishmen, gives a great performance as Gypo that works in symbiosis with Ford's expert visual eye. We can see his feeble mind ticking over his troubles and the prospect of 20 pounds, straining with every minute that goes by, and it's as much Ford's deliberate camera work as it is McLaglen's oafish, plain-as-day body language. Gypo becomes a man out of control - drunk, smug, lying, and so dumb that he even seems to buy into his own bullshit. He starts out impressing his fellow street-fools by shouting them all fish and chips and then buying his way up the social ladder and into a more upmarket drinking establishment, but it's as shortlived as his money and in the end his betrayal of Frankie (Wallace Ford) is completely hollow - his spending spree has no lasting effect, and the friends he buys for the night all quickly disappear.

Some of the techniques Ford employs feel like heavy-handed leftovers from the silent era (such as the double-exposed image of a 20 pound note under a man's face) but he also blocks some scenes in such a visually arresting way (such as the image of Frankie hiding behind a corner in the foreground whilst the police shine a torch towards him from the background). The framing and visual arrangement of the film builds into this tense and cheap atmosphere of foggy Irish streets paved with the poorest of intentions. There's this sense of unease that erupts quite early on with the hysteria that surrounds Frankie's 'capture' by the police.

I think the main thing that stops this film from sticking in one's craw is its avoidance of polemics. Whilst Gypo's treachery is all too apparent, he's also quite pathetic and wretched in the end - we pity him because he doesn't know any better. He needs guidance but the IRA leave him out in the cold prior to the film's beginning and so he instead gets used by people. Ford later said that if did the film again he would've added some humour, but I think as it stands the darker aspects of the story are what makes it so memorable. It's a tragedy for its time, reflecting the dog-eat-dog world of the Depression and meditating on themes of loyalty. I think the subplot between Mary (Heather Angel) and Dan (Preston Foster) could've been dropped if anything did need changing, but the dark and uncondescending ambiguity is what makes The Informer so great in the years beyond its era.

DIRECTOR: John Ford
SCRIPT/SOURCE: Screenplay by Dudley Nichols, based on a book by Liam O'Flaherty.
KEY ACTORS: Victor McLaglen, Heather Foster, Preston Foster, Margot Grahame, Wallace Ford

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel The Informer by Liam O'Flaherty, written in 1925.
- Previously adapted as a British film, The Informer, in 1929.
- See also: Ryan's Daughter, Shake Hands with the Devil, Odd Man Out, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Beloved Enemy and Bloody Sunday. All concern civil unrest in Ireland and/or the IRA.
- Ford's other 'Best Director' Academy Award winners were The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man.
- Ford and McLaglen previously teamed up on The Lost Patrol. McLaglen would later feature as a supporting player in a few of Ford's 1950s films.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (McLaglen) and Best Screenplay. Also nominated for Best Film and Best Editing.
Venice Film Festival - nominated for Best Film.