Revenge is a Dish Best Served Hot

 “Black 47,” film directed by Lance Daly, 2018

This film is about the year 1847, the year of the worst Irish famine.  During the famine, a million died and another million left for the U.S.  A deserting Connaught ranger, Martin Feeney, who fought for British colonialism in Afghanistan and India returns to Ireland.  He finds his mother starved to death and his brother hanged; Ellie, his brother’s wife who he wants to take to the U.S. in dire straights; the pigs of the local tax collector rooting around his family house. The locals look down on him for his role in fighting for the colonial occupier.

Returning 'Home'

A squad of the Royal Irish Constabulary supervised by the British land-owner’s bailiff arrive to evict Ellie and her children, proceeding to destroy her cottage.  Death and destruction follow in the bitter cold.  Feeney decides on revenge.  He now realizes who his real enemy is.  In the process, he gains an unpredictable ally. The film becomes a bloody action film.  If you are an anti-colonialist viewer, revenge will be thoroughly enjoyable, a dish best served hot.

The film focuses on the various crimes of the English colonialists:  Harsh sentences are handed down for minor crimes by British judges.  Grains and food are exported to England by English landowners while the Irish starve.  Nasty evictions from tiny cottages are carried out due to non-payment to the local colonial land lord.  Independence activists in the Young Ireland movement are brutalized in prison.  Arrogant Church of England ‘Soupers’ attempt to convert starving Catholics by offering them soup.

This film joins the small club of anti-British colonial films – Gandhi, The Patriot, Braveheart, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, The Wind Shakes the Barley and Jimmy’s Hall (the last is reviewed in the blog below).  Other films depicting British crimes – the 1943 Bengal famine; concentration camps in the 2^nd Boer War; the bloody British partition of India and Pakistan; the anti-British independence struggle in Iraq; the ethnic handover of Sri Lanka to Sinhala elites; the British forbidding discussion of Italian war crimes in Ethiopia; the crushing of the De Mau Mau in Kenya are a minority, as opposed to the heroic role of England in WWII.  This film joins the former club and is on Netflix.

By the way Black 47 was also an Irish rock band based in New York.  Listen to their great political song titled James Connolly on YouTube.  Black 47:  James Connolly

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left with these terms:  Jimmy’s Hall, Abortion Referendum in Ireland, The Immortal Irishman, The Plough and the Stars, James Connolly, 1916 Rebellion Walking Tour, The Irish Literary Trail, Brexit, The Dream of the Celt. 

The Kultur Kommissar

October 30, 2020